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But while she raged he thought of his father, cut down by hers. His father had gone out of this keep alive and come back to it dead, by Torquil Dunmore’s doing. Every soul in his house remembered it. That was the grudge they carried across the yard to spit at her feet, and he could not find it in himself to blame them for carrying it.

Then he thought of the boy. Coll Dunmore had died on Alasdair’s raid. Whatever had happened on that hill, and however it had come about, the raid had been his and the order had been his, and the blame was his whichever way it fell.

He would not stand in his own room and plead it to a Dunmore.

Not to her father. Not to her either, with her chin up and the ink at his feet.

“Say something,” she said. “Ye had plenty to say a moment ago.”

“Hold still,” he said. “I’m looking at ye.”

He looked at her properly then.

He had taken the green gown for some fashion of the Dunmores. It was too short for her. The hem stopped well above her ankles, and the house shoes she had ridden in were still caked grey with yesterday’s mud. A stain had spread down the whole front of the skirt, old and brown, the kind that went into the wool and stayed. One sleeve had been torn half off at the shoulder and was knotted up to keep it there. Under the knot her skin was white and pinched with cold, and he saw now that she was shivering. She had stood an arm’s length from his fire the whole time and never once turned toward it.

He had sent her up with Agnes. He had told Agnes to see she had what she needed. He had looked up at the tower last night and seen no light and no smoke, and he had told himself she was asleep.

She’ll want for nothing, he had said to her father, in her father’s own hall.

Somebody had dressed his bride in a rag. Agnes had laid that gown out for her, or one of Agnes’s girls had, and every one of them knew exactly what they were doing: a short, stained, torn thing for the Dunmore woman, so the whole yard could see what she was worth. And if they had chosen her clothes, they had chosen her cold hearth and her empty table too. He had told his people she was their lady. They had heard him, and they had spat on it.

It was an insult to her. It was an insult to him, in his own house, from his own people, behind his back. The rage came up through him so hard his sight went dark at the edges. His hand had closed into a fist against his thigh, and he was angrier with himself than with any of them, because he had stood in that yard and heard the silence and gone to see to the horses. She had told him so to his face not long ago, and he had laughed at her.

Alasdair opened his mouth.

Iona was already moving. She turned from him with the stained skirt swinging short above her ankles and went out, and slammed the door behind her so hard the candlestick rocked on the desk. He heard her quick steps go away down the passage toward the hall and the cold tower stairs beyond it.

He stood there with the ink drying round his boot. It had gone deep into the boards. No amount of scrubbing would lift it out now, and he found he did not want it lifted.

The inkwell lay in two pieces by the leg of the desk. He bent and picked them up. The bottom half still held a pool of ink, and it ran out over his fingers.

Somebody in his house had decided how the laird’s bride would be kept, and had not troubled to ask the laird. They had shamed his wife, and through her they had shamed him.

Alasdair flung the broken inkwell at the wall. It smashed against the stone and the ink came back at him, across his hands and the front of his shirt. He swept his arm across the desk, and the letter and the ledgers and the brass candlestick went crashing to the floor. He kicked his chair over on its back. Then he wrenched the door open so hard it bounced off the wall, and went down the passage toward the hall with ink dripping off his fingers.

“Agnes!” he roared, and the whole keep heard him.

3

Iona woke warm, and the warmth frightened her more than all the cold of the night before.

She lay still with her heart pounding and did not trust it. The grey curve of the wall was close enough to touch, and the window behind her had gone pale. She had fallen asleep in the stained green gown with every blanket wound round her and her feet drawn up, chilled to the bone and too proud to weep. Now there was heat on the back of her neck, and a smell of smoke, and a soft crackle she knew better than her own name.

She sat up so fast the blankets slid to the floor.

The hearth was blazing. Somebody had built a fire in that swept-bare grate while she slept, the peats stacked on end so the air could get between them, with a full basket on the stone beside it. Steam curled off a tub of water toward the window. On the lid of the chest lay a pile of folded cloth that had not been there last night.

Somebody had been in this room. Somebody had knelt at her hearth and carried water up all those stairs and laid clothes on her chest, and she had slept through every bit of it like a child. Her stomach turned over. Her hands flew to the front of the gown, to the knot at her shoulder. It was as tight as she had tied it. She let out a breath through her teeth, and the anger came in behind the fear, hot and welcome.

She went to the chest and lifted the folded cloth. A shift of clean linen. Stockings. Shoes, plain and soft, near enough her size. Under them lay a gown of deep blue wool, the colour of the loch she had seen from the gate. She let it fall open and held it against herself. The hem touched the floor. Both sleeves were sewn on.

So this was his answer.

Yesterday she had thrown his ink at his feet and told him she would die in his tower before she begged him for anything. Yesterday he had laughed at her, his grey eyes creasing at the corners as if her rage were the best sport he had seen all year. This morning he sent her a fire and a gown. He took her for a stray cat, to be coaxed down off a wall with a saucer of milk. He thought cold had made her stubborn, and he meant to see what warmth would do.

She flung the blue gown across the room. It hit the wall and slid down in a heap.

“I’ll no’ be bought,” she told the empty room, and her voice came out thin and high.