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Then she stood there breathing hard, with the fire on her shins, and made herself think. Why would Alasdair MacVey, whose raid had killed Coll, spend one stick of kindling on Torquil Dunmore’s daughter? Kindness had nothing to do with it. A man warmed a hostage when he wanted her soft and grateful first. He wanted her eating from his hand, so that when her father moved, she would be the one to tell him which way.

Well. Let him try.

She would, however, wash in that hot water before it went cold, because she was a Dunmore and no fool. She stripped off the old gown and stepped into the tub. The heat closed round her ankles, and she let out a breath she had been holding since Dunmore. She scrubbed herself quickly and angrily, and then, because nobody could see her, slowly. She picked the blue gown off the floor, brushed the dust from it, and put it on over the clean shift. It fitted her at the waist and shoulders and came down to her shoes, and she hated how much better she felt standing in it.

She was plaiting her hair before the fire when the knock came.

Agnes came in with a tray and set it down on the chest so hard the cup rattled. There was porridge with cream on it, and bread, and butter, and a cup of warm milk. Her apron was fresh and stiff with starch. Her mouth was a straight line, and her eyes went everywhere except to Iona: to the fire, to the tub, to the window.

They stopped on the green gown hanging over the stool.

“Who lit the fire?” Iona asked.

“It was seen to, my lady.” Agnes bit the last two words off like thread.

“By whose word?” Iona said.

“The laird’s.” Agnes folded her hands over her apron. “He’s given his orders. Ye’re to be treated as the lady of this house from now on, and any who forget it will answer to him.”

She said it flatly, one word after another. Iona looked at the starched apron and the white knuckles and knew exactly what that flatness cost. A housekeeper only stood that straight when her laird had taken the skin off her with his tongue, in front of the whole house.

Good, Iona thought, and was ashamed of how good it felt.

She crossed the floor, snatched the old gown off the stool and held it up between them, the brown stain down the front, the torn sleeve hanging by its knot.

“And this?” she said. “Was this by his word too?”

Agnes’s hands tightened on each other. Then her eyes came to Iona’s face, properly, for the first time since the yard, and what was in them was plain hatred.

“His father rode out of that gate alive,” Agnes said, very low, “and came home dead, and it was yer father did it. Ye’ll forgive me, my lady, if I didnae think to send up silk.”

The words hit Iona like a slap. She felt the blood rush hot into her face.

“My brother died on a MacVey raid,” she said. “Yer laird led it. Ye’ll forgive me if I dinnae weep for his father.”

For a moment neither of them breathed. The fire cracked in the grate between them.

“Will that be all, my lady?” Agnes said.

Iona dropped the gown on the floor at the woman’s feet and left it there.

“The fire was well laid,” she said. “At Dunmore I’d have kept the girl who laid it.”

“I laid it, my lady,” Agnes said. “On his order. If it were mine to choose, ye’d have frozen.”

She went out and shut the door hard enough to rattle the latch. Iona stood staring at it with her fists clenched in the blue wool and her pulse thudding in her ears, and then, to her own astonishment, she laughed out loud into her hand. She could picture it exactly: Agnes on her knees at that hearth before dawn, keys at her belt and her face like a shut gate, building a fire for a Dunmore because her laird had roared at her to do it.

She ate every spoonful of the porridge. She had eaten nothing since the bread at Dunmore the morning before last, and it was good porridge, thick and salted, with yellow cream. She ate the bread and butter after it and drank the milk, and told herself the whole time that it was only food, and that his enemies had to eat as well as his friends.

Down in the yard, steel rang on steel.

Iona went to the window with the empty bowl still warm in her hands.

• • •

Alasdair had slept badly and woken in a black temper, and he was taking it out on Gavin Ross.

He drove at him across the cobbles with the practice sword, and Gavin gave ground, laughing, until he found his feet and came in under Alasdair’s guard and cracked him across the ribs with the flat of the blade.