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He could not answer her.

His mother turned her head away from him, to the girl in the blue gown.

“Lass,” she said. “Will ye come again tomorrow?”

The fury went out of Iona’s face all at once, and Alasdair saw her swallow hard.

“I will, my lady,” she said. “If ye’ll let me open the other shutter.”

“We’ll see about the other shutter,” his mother said, and there it was again, the ghost of a smile at the corner of her mouth.

Then it went. Her eyes drifted past Iona to the grey water, and Alasdair watched the clarity go out of them.

“Go now, the both of ye,” she said, faint and far away. “Leave me be.”

Iona righted the stool and set it back beside the chair as if it were hers now. Then she came toward the door. Alasdair had stepped back into the doorway, and he did not move aside.

She did not ask him to. She turned her shoulder and pushed past him in the narrow doorway, so close that her skirts dragged against his boots and her plait whipped across his arm. Her elbow struck his ribs on the way by, and she did not beg his pardon for it. Her chin was high and her mouth was pressed tight, and her hands were shaking at her sides.

Alasdair looked back once. His mother sat in the light, looking out at the water as if he were no longer there. He pulled her door shut.

Iona had gone three steps when he caught her. He turned her by the shoulder and put her back to the passage wall, hard enough to knock the breath out of her, his hand flat on the stone beside her head.

“Hear me,” he said, low. “If anything happens to my mother, if she is one hour the worse for yer company, I’ll make ye regret it.”

She did not shrink. She bared her teeth at him.

“I dinnae hurt innocents, MacVey,” she said. “That’s yer trade.”

She ducked under his arm and was gone, her quick steps fading down the cold passage.

Murdoch, he thought, would want to know why the laird had been struck dumb in his own passage by his own wife.

Alasdair stood outside his mother’s shut door with his hand still on the cold stone and his mouth open on words that would not come.

5

Iona had sworn on her brother’s name that she would never marry a MacVey, and now she stood at the door of the MacVey chapel with rage in her throat and her heart pounding so hard she could feel it in her teeth.

The chapel was a narrow stone room at the foot of the keep, candles burning either side of the altar, and it was full. MacVey men lined both walls with their hair combed down wet. Agnes was there with her keys, and Murdoch, and the broad, fair man she had seen fighting the laird in the yard, thumbs in his belt, grinning at nothing.

A woman by the font turned her face to the wall.

She was the only Dunmore in the room. Heat pricked behind her eyes, and she would have died before she let them see it. She raised her head and walked up between them in a gown of cream silk. Two of Agnes’s maids had laced her into it that morning, and she had fought them for every lace. She looked every one of them in the face as she passed.

Alasdair waited for her before the altar. She had not laid eyes on him since their quarrel in his mother’s room yesterday, and her breath hitched. He wore a dark coat with his plaid over his shoulder, his black hair tied back, and he looked so handsome and so dangerous that her step faltered. He watched her come the whole length of the chapel, as if every step she took belonged to him already.

Beside the priest stood a stranger. He was a Lowlander in a velvet coat gone shiny at the cuffs, with a tired, patient face. In his hand he held the King’s order, the same letter Murdoch had read aloud in her father’s hall.

“Sir Robert Lindsay,” Alasdair said. “The King’s commissioner. He’s come to see it done.”

Sir Robert bowed to her. “My lady. His Majesty wishes to hear that his order was carried out.”

“Then tell him I came,” Iona said, “because there was nowhere left to run.”

“She tried,” Alasdair said. “I caught her.”

Heat flew into her face. “Ye dragged me home across yer saddle in front of yer men.”