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The chair by the fire was empty. The grey blanket lay over one arm of it, folded square at the corners, as if nobody had sat under it all night. The fire she had banked for him still glowed red under its ash. He had got up and gone out and left her lying there, and he had not said one word.

She had told him to keep to his chair. He had kept to it. She should have been glad, and instead her throat ached with it.

She crossed the boards and laid her hand flat on the seat. The wood was cold. He had been gone a long while.

She had the cream silk wedding gown back on and half laced when the latch lifted without a knock.

A girl came in with an armful of clean linen. She was young, younger than Iona, with a thin face that narrowed to a sharp, pointed chin. She bobbed a knee in the doorway, quick and stiff, and her eyes went straight past Iona to the bed.

“Morag, my lady,” the girl said. “Agnes sent me for the sheets.”

“Then take them,” Iona said.

Morag dumped the clean linen on the chest and went to the bed. She dragged the blankets back. She pulled the bottom sheet loose from its corners, and then, before she had it gathered, she stopped. She held it up to the window and turned it over across her arm, slowly, so Iona would see her do it.

It was white from one end to the other.

Morag’s eyes went to the empty chair and the folded blanket on its arm, and came back to the sheet. Her pointed chin dipped. Then she laughed. She did not hide it behind her hand. She laughed straight at Iona, a short, ugly snicker through her nose.

Heat rushed up Iona’s throat and into her face so fast that her ears roared.

She could see exactly what the girl was seeing. A white sheet. An empty chair with a blanket folded square on its arm. A bride her husband would not touch.

By noon the whole keep would know it. They would say it in the kitchen and the yard and the stables. The Dunmore girl had not been enough for their laird. He had taken one look at her in his bed and gone to sleep in a chair.

Morag bundled the sheet against her chest, bobbed, slow and mocking, and went out.

Iona crept after her and opened the door a crack. Further down the stairs came a burst of laughter, and another voice joined it.

“In a chair!” someone said. “A Dunmore in his bed, and he’d sooner sleep in a chair!”

“Maybe she wasnae enough for him,” said another, and they laughed again.

Iona eased the door shut and stood in the middle of the room with her hands so cold and clumsy she could not finish her laces. Her eyes burned, and she blinked hard. She would not weep over a sheet.

She had been spat at in the yard. She had sat at the high table while a drunk man called her a knife in the laird’s back, and she had borne both with her chin up. This was worse. A maid had laughed in her face over her own sheet, and her great protector had left her to it.

She made herself think.

At the high table he had told her his people would be watching. So he had known what they would look for this morning. He had known exactly what that white sheet would say about her, and he had folded his blanket and walked out, and left her standing here to be the one they laughed at.

Was it a punishment for the ink on his floor? Or was it simpler than that?

“Let’s see how many nights ye last,” he had said, “before ye cross this floor to me.” So this was his game. Let the whole keep laugh at the bride he would not touch, until she crossed that floor to him herself.

Her jaw set.

“Then wait, MacVey,” she said to the empty chair. “Wait till ye’re old and grey in it.”

Her own things lay on the chest by the door, where somebody had carried them down from the tower for her wedding night: her old brown working gown and her apron, folded together. She looked at them. Then she went to the door and wrenched it open.

A boy was coming down the stairs with a basket of firewood on his hip. He could not have been more than ten, all knees and freckles.

“Will ye help me?” Iona asked. Her voice came out softer than she meant it to. “Set that down a moment.”

He set it down and came, shy, with his eyes on her face. She put the brown gown and the apron into his arms.

“Up to the tower,” she said. “The room at the top. Then ye can come back for yer basket.”