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Lady Mairead was quiet for so long that Iona thought she had drifted away again.

“I’m done asking them for anything,” Iona said, harder than she meant. “They bob at me because he told them to. They bob, and they snicker behind it. At Dunmore I’d only to look at a girl and she’d mend her ways. Here I could stand in the kitchen and shout, and the cook would go on with her bread.”

“Ye’ve been a guest in this house,” Lady Mairead said softly, as if it grieved her. “A frightened one.”

Iona stiffened on the stool.

“I’m no’ frightened of any of them,” she said.

“Then why,” the lady asked gently, “did ye carry yer gowns back up to the tower?”

“Because I’ll no’ lie in his bed to be laughed at!” Iona was on her feet before she knew it, the stool scraping back behind her. “Because he walked out and left me to it. Because he thinks I’ll be the one to cross that floor to him, and I’ll no’. I’ll no’ wait in his chamber like a dog for a kind word.”

“So ye went up the stairs,” Lady Mairead said, very low, “and waited there instead. And did anyone come?”

Iona opened her mouth. Nothing came out of it. Her face burned to the roots of her hair.

“A guest asks for a fire,” the lady said quietly. “A lady orders one laid, and stands by the hearth to see it done. A guest lets a girl laugh at her sheets. A lady puts the girl to scouring the pots till her pointed wee chin is black with soot.” Her voice was growing faint. “Ye kept Dunmore Keep, ye told me, with nobody to show ye how. Keep this one. Agnes has had those keys at her belt long enough. It hasnae made her any sweeter.”

Iona laughed before she could stop it, a short, startled sound. Then the laugh went out of her, and she sat back down on the stool very slowly with her fists in her lap.

“And yer son?” she asked. “When I start ordering his household about?”

“My son will do whatever he does,” Lady Mairead said. “Ye’ll find out what that is soon enough, I expect.”

She turned her face back to the light then, to both open windows and the grey loch beyond them, and her eyes slowly closed.

Iona laid the thin hand gently back on the shawl and went out, and pulled the door to behind her.

The west passage was cold and dim. She stood in it with her back against the wall and her heart slamming, and thought of Morag’s chin, and Agnes’s keys, and the cook who would not see her.

She thought of Alasdair MacVey, who had choked a man against the wall for one word against his wife, and then left that wife alone with a white sheet for the whole keep to read. She thought of his weight on her in the firelight, and heat went through her so low and sudden that she pressed her back into the cold stone.

If she started giving orders in his keep, what would he do to her?

7

Iona was so afraid of failing in front of them that her mouth had gone dry, and she walked into the hall anyway with her fists clenched in her skirts, because she would rather die on that floor than let a MacVey girl snigger at her again.

The hall was full of the morning’s work. Girls were sweeping out the floor by the door, lads went past with water from the well, men were stacking the trestles from last night, and a kitchen boy ran through with a crock on his hip. Agnes was at the hearth, counting candles into a basket, and Morag sat on the end of a bench with a pile of linen in her lap and her pointed chin propped on her fist, doing nothing at all.

Iona stood at the foot of the high table, where every one of them could see her, with her heart slamming against her ribs.

“Agnes,” she said.

The housekeeper looked up from the candles, slow. “My lady?”

“The rushes in the west passage are to be changed today. Fresh ones, all the way to Lady Mairead’s door.” Iona kept her chin high. “The lamp in that passage is to be lit at dusk, every night. And Lady Mairead is to have a fire laid in her room each morning before she wakes, the same as mine.”

Agnes set down the candle she was holding. “On whose word, my lady?”

“On mine.” Iona heard her own voice ring off the rafters. “The laird stood in the yard and told ye I was to be yer lady. A lady keeps the house. So I’ll have the keys.”

She held out her hand.

Nobody breathed. Agnes’s hand went to the ring at her belt and closed over it, and the keys clinked under her fingers.

“Ye’ll have to take them, my lady,” Agnes said. “I had them from the old laird’s widow, no’ from a Dunmore.”