Page 13

“She’ll manage,” Alasdair said. “She threw my own ink at me.”

He lifted his head and dashed the water from his eyes, and his glance went up the dark side of the tower to the window at the top of it.

She was there.

He could see her plainly, framed in the narrow stone, in a gown of deep blue with her red plait lying over her shoulder and something cupped in her hands. She was looking down into the yard, at him. She did not move when he caught her at it. She did not step back into the room, as a modest woman would have done. She held her head high and looked, just as she had looked at him across his own desk with the ink dripping off his boot.

Alasdair stood still in the cold with his wet shirt clinging to him and his arms bare, the sword hanging from his hand, and looked back.

He did not look away. Neither did she.

It went on long enough that his heart began to go slow and heavy, as it had beside the boulder with her fists twisted in his plaid. He knew what he looked like to her: a MacVey in his shirt, sweating in his own yard, water running off his chin. He could have reached for the plaid on the well. He left it where it was. Let her look her fill, then, and choke on it.

He wondered if her hands had tightened on that sill the way his had tightened on the hilt. He wanted, with a sudden fierceness that made him furious, to climb those stairs and find out.

Her lips moved. He could not hear what she said, and he would have given a good horse to know if it was his name or some word she had learned from her father’s grooms.

“Alasdair,” Gavin said. “Ye’ll catch yer death.”

Alasdair smiled up at the window, slowly, the smile he knew she hated. Above him, at the same moment, she stepped back from the sill. He turned his back on the tower, which cost him more than he would ever have said, and faced his captain.

“I’ll tell ye this for nothing,” he said. “I’ll have my stubborn bride wrapped round my finger before long. Eating from my hand. Glad to see me come in at the door.”

Gavin’s eyebrows went up. “Her? The one who threw yer own ink at ye?”

“Her,” Alasdair said.

“Will ye put a wager on it?” Gavin asked.

“I will,” Alasdair said.

Gavin threw back his head and laughed, and the chipped tooth flashed. “Done,” he said, and stuck out his hand. Alasdair took it, and Gavin held on a moment longer than he needed to, still grinning. “But I’ll have the terms plain. If ye fall for her first, ye lose. Any day ye cannae keep yer eyes off that window, I’m winning.”

“I’ll no’ fall,” Alasdair said.

“Ye’ve been staring at it this half hour.”

“I was looking at the smoke,” Alasdair said.

“Aye,” Gavin said. “So was I. Lovely smoke. Red hair on it.” He let go of Alasdair’s hand. “And the stake?”

“Name it when ye’ve lost,” Alasdair said.

He came at Gavin before the man had his guard up, and drove him back across the cobbles to the stable wall, blow after blow, until Gavin was gasping and laughing at once. Only then did Alasdair let himself look up. The window was full of blue again.

He wondered, as Gavin shoved off the wall and came back at him swinging, how far a man’s voice carried up a tower on a still, cold morning.

Let Torquil Dunmore steal his cattle in the dark. Alasdair would take something better from him, in the full light of day. He would have the man’s daughter mad for him, burning for a MacVey, lying awake at night for want of him. There was no revenge on Dunmore sweeter than that.

4

Iona was furious with herself, and the fury had nowhere to go, so by the time the porridge bowl was cold in her lap she was pacing the floor of the room a MacVey had warmed for her.

She had eaten his bread. She was wearing his blue gown. She had stood at his window and watched him in his wet shirt for far longer than she would ever confess to a priest. When he smiled up at her she had said a word into the cold air that her mother would have scrubbed out of her mouth with soap. She set the bowl down so hard the spoon jumped out.

Well, she would not sit up here like a hen in a coop and wait to see what he sent her next.

If she was to be the lady of this house, she would know the house. At Dunmore she had known every cupboard. Here she did not even know where they kept the candles.