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“The tower, my lady?” the boy asked.

“Aye,” Iona said. “If ye would.”

He went. She followed him up the turning stairs with her skirts gripped in her fist and her face still burning. He laid her things on the chest beside the green gown as carefully as if they were silk, and smoothed the apron flat with both hands. At the door he stopped, scarlet to his ears.

“They shouldnae laugh at ye, my lady,” he mumbled. “It isnae kind.”

Then he was gone, clattering down the stairs before she could thank him. Hardly a soul in this keep had spared her a kind word, and a small boy with a firewood basket had found one. Her throat ached. She sat down on the edge of the narrow bed.

Let him find his bed empty tonight, and his wife gone back up the stairs where she had been put the day she came.

Then she listened.

She listened all morning. She listened for boots on the stairs, for Agnes’s keys, for anybody at all to come and tell her that the laird’s wife slept in the laird’s chamber.

The bell rang for the noon meal. The stairs stayed empty.

Nobody came. Nobody cared which room she slept in. Not his household, and not him. She sat with her hands knotted in her lap until the loneliness of it was worse than the anger, and she could not sit still under either.

She got up and went down to find the one soul in the place who had asked her to come back.

• • •

The lamp in the west passage was still unlit. But when Iona knocked at the door at the end of it, the voice inside said, “Come in,” and did not tell her to leave anything by the door.

The shutter she had forced open stood open still. Grey light lay across the boards and the high-backed chair, and Lady MacVey sat in it with her shawl around her shoulders and her face turned to the loch. The other shutter was barred.

“Lady MacVey,” the lady said, without turning her head.

Iona stopped in the doorway. It took her a moment to understand that the lady meant her. It was her name now.

“That’s yer name, my lady,” she said.

“It was mine. It’s yours now, with all the trouble that comes with it.” The lady turned from the window, and her grey eyes went over Iona’s face. “I’ll be Lady Mairead, I suppose. An old aunt at the end of a passage that nobody visits.”

“I visited,” Iona said.

“Ye did.” Lady Mairead looked at her a moment longer. “Ye’ve been crying.”

“I havenae,” Iona said.

“Then ye’ve been wanting to, and holding it in yer jaw. I can see it from here.” The lady lifted one thin hand from the shawl. “Sit down, lass. And if ye want something to hit, ye may open the other shutter.”

Iona stood very still. Since the day she came, nobody in this keep had truly looked at her. They looked at her red hair, and her name, and her sheet. This frail woman had looked once and seen straight through to the hurt, and something in Iona’s chest loosened so suddenly that she could not trust her voice.

Iona went to it at once. The bar was as stiff as the first had been. She set her shoulder under it and heaved with all the morning’s rage behind her, and it came up with a screech of iron, and the shutter banged wide against the wall. Light poured in from both sides now. It caught every grey streak in the lady’s hair.

In the new light Iona saw the room properly for the first time. It was not the bare cell she had thought it. A painted chest stood under the window, its lid covered in twining birds. On the shelf above the hearth sat a row of small treasures: a silver brooch shaped like a stag, a carved wooden otter with a fish in its mouth, a dish of sea-smooth stones, white and green and rose. On the far wall hung a little painting of the loch in summer, bright and blue, with a boat drawn up on the shingle.

“Oh,” Iona said softly, the iron bar still in her hand. “It’s beautiful.”

“Gregor brought me every one.” The lady’s voice was low and far away, but there was warmth in it. “The stag he won at a fair in Inverness, wrestling a smith twice his size. The otter he carved himself, one winter, by that fire. He cut his thumb to the bone on it and swore so loud the priest heard him in the chapel.” Her mouth softened. “The stones he gathered off the shore the summer Alasdair was born. One for every day we stayed.”

“And the painting?” Iona asked.

“A man came through selling them, and Gregor bought the only one with a boat in it. He said it was ours.” The lady smiled a little. “We used to row out on the loch of an evening, him and me, with Alasdair asleep in the bottom of the boat on the nets. Those were good days. Long, light days.”

She was quiet then. Her eyes went to the window, and the light in her face went out of it slowly, like a lamp turned down.