Page 19

“Ye’ll have to eat, wife,” Alasdair said.

“I’ll eat when I’m hungry, MacVey,” she said.

“Ye’ve a long night ahead of ye.”

The blood rushed into her face. She turned and looked at him, and he looked back with that smile, the slow one he kept for making her angry.

“I’d sooner go hungry at Dunmore than feast at yer table,” she said.

“Ye’ll no’ get the chance.” He drank. “Ye’re in my sight now every day ye live.”

“I’ll never get used to it,” Iona said.

“Ye looked at me long enough in the chapel.”

She set her knife down so hard it rang. “I was looking for the door.”

“Aye,” Alasdair said. “And ye found my mouth instead.”

The fair man leaned around him from the other side. “Ye’re staring at her again, my laird.”

“She’s my wife,” Alasdair said. “I’m allowed.”

“That isnae what the terms said,” the fair man said.

“What terms?” Iona asked.

“Nothing,” both men said at once, and the fair man hid his chipped tooth in his cup.

Ale went round in jugs, and every few minutes a MacVey man got up to toast his laird. None of them toasted her. When the girl came along the high table with the bread, she reached past Iona’s trencher as if nobody sat there. Men at the lower tables turned on the benches to sneer up at the Dunmore bride, and Iona stared them down one by one.

A big man got to his feet at the lower table, red-faced and swaying, drunk since the meat came in.

“Angus Bain’ll give ye a toast!” he shouted. “To the laird and his Dunmore bride!”

The men around him cheered and banged the board.

“And may God keep him the night,” Angus roared, grinning round at them. “For I’d no’ close my eyes with a Dunmore in my bed. She’ll have a knife in yer back, my laird, before ye’ve got her shift off!”

The laughter burst up all down the lower tables. Iona’s face burned so hot her eyes watered. Under the board her hands knotted in her silk skirts until her nails bit her palms, and she sat rigid and did not move. Spat at in the yard. Turned from in the chapel. Laughed at on her own wedding night. Would she ever have one peaceful day in this damned keep?

Beside her, Alasdair set down his cup.

Then he moved.

He went over the end of the high table and down the hall with his boots ringing on the flagstones, and the men at the tables shrank back as he passed. Then his hand closed round Angus’s throat and drove him back against the wall so hard the torch above them guttered.

Angus hung there against the stone with his eyes bulging and his big hands scrabbling at his laird’s wrist, and could not shift it.

Iona gasped. Terror froze her to the bench. She had known he was dangerous. She had never seen it loosed like this. And under the fear, something in her chest ached and gave way. He had done it for her.

“Say it again,” Alasdair said.

Angus made a choking sound.

“She is my wife.” Alasdair spoke quietly, and every soul in the hall heard him. “Any man who insults my wife insults me. Does any other man here want to insult me?”

Nobody answered. Nobody moved. Under one of the tables a dog whined and was still.