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She went down the stairs with her new skirts gathered in one hand. In the hall a girl with a bucket saw her coming and did not step aside. She let the bucket swing, and dirty water slopped across the flagstones and over the hem of the blue gown.

“Mind yer feet, Dunmore,” the girl said, and did not trouble to bob.

Iona stopped. Cold water soaked through to her ankle. Behind the girl two men at the long table had stopped eating to watch, and one of them grinned into his ale.

“Mind yer bucket,” Iona said, “or I’ll put yer head in it.” She took a step toward the girl. “And ye’ll call me my lady. No’ Dunmore.”

The grin went off the man’s face. The girl went red to the ears, muttered it at the floor and hurried away. Iona walked on fast with her wet hem slapping at her shins and her face set. She would not give one of them the pleasure of seeing her run.

Out of sight of the hall, she could not get a full breath. She put her back to the wall and pressed her palms flat to the cold stone, and the passage went hot and blurred in front of her. Every face in that hall had wished her gone, and not one of them had seen what it cost her to walk past them.

She blinked hard until the stinging stopped. The kitchens could wait until her hands were steady.

She took the other passage, the one that ran west, away from the hall and the laird’s warm room.

It was colder here. The rushes on the floor were grey and flattened, and nobody had lit the lamp in the bracket on the wall. At the end of it stood a door, shut, with no light showing underneath.

Iona stopped in front of it with her pulse beating hard in her throat. She lifted her hand and knocked.

“Leave it by the door,” a woman’s voice said from inside.

The voice was low and tired, and it was nobody’s she knew. Iona put her hand on the latch and went in.

The room was nearly dark. The shutters were closed over both windows, and only a thin line of grey came in at the edges of them. She could make out a bed, a chest, and a high-backed chair, and in the chair a woman sitting very straight with a shawl around her shoulders.

“I said leave it by the door, lass.” The woman did not turn her head. “Put the tray down and go. And tell Agnes I’m no’ hungry.”

“I’ve no tray,” Iona said.

“Then what are ye for?” the woman asked.

Iona’s eyes had begun to find their way in the dimness. The woman was older than her own mother would have been, though not by many years. Her hair was pinned up plain, and it had been fair once. Grey had come through the fair of it in long streaks, like frost through dead grass. Her hands lay in her lap on top of the shawl, thin and white, the fingers folded together.

No servant sat that straight. There was only one lady this could be, kept at the cold end of a MacVey house, and Iona’s breath caught. His mother.

“I’m none of Agnes’s girls,” Iona said. “I’m no one important, my lady.”

The woman’s head came round slowly, as if even that cost her. She looked at Iona for a long, silent moment, at the blue gown and the wet hem and the red plait over her shoulder.

“No one,” she said at last, softly, and her gaze drifted past Iona to the door. “There’s been shouting in the hall, and horses in the yard. My son tells me nothing anymore.”

Iona stood on the cold boards and thought of her own mother, dead and buried at Dunmore. And here was this woman, living, alone in the dark at the far end of a passage nobody swept. What could have pushed her into such a life? Widows wept and then went on keeping their houses. What had shut this one away, and why had her son let it?

Her throat tightened until it ached.

She went to the nearer window, because she could not stand the dark one moment longer. The bar on the shutter was stiff with disuse, and she had to put her shoulder to it.

“Leave that,” Lady MacVey said, with a catch of fear in her thin voice.

“I cannae see yer face, my lady.”

“There’s no need for ye to see it.”

“There’s every need.” Iona got the bar up and flung the shutter open so hard it banged against the wall. “I’ll not sit and talk to a voice in the dark like a ghost in a cupboard.”

Light came in, grey and clean, with the shine of the loch in it. Lady MacVey put a hand up against it and turned her face away, and Iona saw how pale she was, as pale as the linen on the bed.

The lady lowered her hand slowly and did not tell her to shut it again. Her eyes were Alasdair’s eyes, grey and steady and giving nothing away.