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“Ye’re slow this morning,” Gavin said.

“I’m letting ye live,” Alasdair said, “for yer mother’s sake.”

He went for him again, harder. They had been knocking each other about this yard since they were boys too small to lift a real blade, and he knew every one of Gavin’s habits: the dip of the left shoulder before a lunge, the grin he wore when he was losing so nobody could tell. Gavin was as fair as Alasdair was dark, broad through the chest and thick in the arm, with a front tooth chipped on the edge of a stone trough when they were boys. He grinned now, and the chipped tooth showed, and Alasdair beat his blade aside so hard it flew out of his hand and rang on the stones. He put his point to Gavin’s belly.

“Aye, well,” Gavin said, and stepped back, and laughed again, shaking out his stinging fingers.

The morning was cold and bright, and Alasdair’s shirt was stuck to his back. He had thrown his plaid over the edge of the well and shoved his sleeves past the elbow, and his arms steamed in the air. He dipped a cup in the bucket and drank, and poured the rest over his head.

Gavin leaned on the well beside him. Some of the laughter went out of his face.

“Word came in from the river at first light,” he said. “They lifted cattle off the low grazing, down by the ford. Drove them over the water before anybody was up.”

Alasdair set the cup down. “Who saw them?”

“The herd’s lad, from the hill. He says they wore no colours. No plaid, no badge, nothing to say what clan they rode for. Plain dun cloth, the lot of them.”

“Dunmore,” Alasdair said.

“They wore nothing to say so,” Gavin said.

“That’s how I ken it’s him.” Alasdair’s fist came down on the lip of the well, and the cup jumped and rolled. “Every thief in the Highlands wants ye to know whose man he is. Only one wants ye to guess. He’ll sit in his chair with his hands folded and give me his daughter with one hand, and his men will go out at night in no colours and steal my beasts with the other.”

“Ye said much the same about the men in the rocks,” Gavin said.

“And I was right about them too.”

He stared south over the wall, toward the river and the hills that ran down to Dunmore Keep, and felt the old rage climb up his throat. Torquil Dunmore had killed his father with soft words in the morning and a hard blade by dark. Now he had sent his daughter to sleep under this roof, and was stealing from it the very same week.

Gavin turned the practice sword over in his hands and studied the edge of it, which was a thing he did when he had something else to say and was working round to it.

“There’s talk in the kitchen,” he said.

“There’s always talk in the kitchen,” Alasdair said.

“No’ like this.” Gavin glanced at him sideways. “They say ye had Agnes in yer room yesterday, and the whole household into the hall after, and that ye near took the roof off. They say ye swore the next one to spit at the Dunmore lass, or laugh behind her, or leave her a cold hearth, would be out on the road with what they stood up in. Man or woman. Old servant or new.”

“I did,” Alasdair said.

“Yer men think ye’ve gone soft for her.”

On the wall above them, somebody snorted. Alasdair swung round. Some of his men stood at the parapet with their elbows on the stone, and the nearest of them had his hand over his mouth.

“Ye think I’ve gone soft?” Alasdair called up. “Come down. Bring a sword.”

Nobody came down. The man took his hand away from his mouth and found something to look at on the far hills.

“Aye,” Alasdair said. “I thought no’.”

Gavin’s grin came back, slow. “I’m saying it myself, and I’m no’ even a Dunmore.”

Alasdair picked up his sword. He thought of the ink black on his floor, and the gown too short for her, and the shiver she had stood there with and never once given in to. He thought of his own people choosing her clothes and her fire and her water, and choosing them to shame her, and his grip tightened on the hilt until the leather creaked.

“She’s my bride,” he said. “Whatever her father is, the King has given her to me, and she’ll wear my name. Any man in this keep who shames her shames me. Any woman who leaves her cold leaves me cold.” He looked along the blade. “If there’s humbling to be done of Iona Dunmore, I’ll do it myself. Nobody else here has the right.”

Gavin laughed so hard that the men on the wall looked round again.

“God help the lass,” he said. “She’s to have the one tormentor, and it’s to be you.”