Page 27

Iona tore her wrist out of his hand. The red marks of his fingers were already rising on her skin.

“Keep yer keep, then, MacVey,” she said. “I hope it falls on ye.”

She walked down the hall between the brooms and the grinning faces with her back straight. She did not run until the yard door had slammed behind her.

Then she ran.

She crossed the cobbles at a run, with the wind slapping her wet face. Her grey mare was in the end stall, where his men had put her the day they brought her from Dunmore, and she threw up her head and whickered.

“My lady?” A stable boy scrambled up out of the straw. “Will I fetch the laird?”

“Fetch me a bridle,” Iona said.

He brought it, staring. She hauled herself onto the mare’s bare back from the edge of the manger and turned her for the door, and the boy jumped out of her road.

The gate stood open for a carter’s cart of peats coming in. Iona drove her heels into the mare and went straight past it, so close that the carter bellowed and his horse shied in the shafts. Then she was out, and the road ran away in front of her up the glen toward the open moor.

Her breath was coming in hard, ugly sobs, and every stride of the mare jarred them loose. Morag’s laugh rang in her ears over the wind. She had stood in that hall with her hand out like a beggar, and he had let them laugh at it. Worse, he had made them laugh. She had never been so humiliated in her life, and the shame of it burned hotter than the wind on her face.

Above the glen the sky had gone the colour of slate.

• • •

Alasdair stood in the middle of his own hall and listened to the yard door rattle in its frame.

Morag was still giggling into her hand.

He crossed the floor to her, and the hall went silent around him.

“On yer feet!” he roared, and the girl scrambled up so fast her linen spilled across the floor. “She is yer lady and she is my wife. Ye’ll do whatever she bids ye, and ye’ll do it now.”

Morag stared at him, white to the lips. “My laird?”

“Ye heard me,” Alasdair said.

She fled. Agnes opened her mouth, saw his face, and shut it.

He had done it to win. His wife had carried her gowns back up to the tower without telling him, and he had wanted to sting her for it. Then she had dared him in front of his own hall, and he had wanted to win so badly he could taste it. He had wanted to hurt her back, and he had. Now the regret of it sat in his chest like a stone.

Hooves clattered in the yard. Somebody shouted at the gate.

Gavin went to the door, looked out, and turned back with his eyebrows up. “That’s yer wife away out the gate on her grey mare,” he said. “No saddle, and riding like the devil was after her.”

Alasdair walked past him into the passage that led to the yard. He stopped there where the hall could not see him, and he drove his fist into the stone wall.

Pain shot up his arm. He hit the wall again, harder. When he pulled his hand back the skin had split open across the knuckles, and blood was running down between his fingers onto the flagstones.

Gavin looked at the blood, and then at the wall.

“That wall never said a word against her,” he said.

“Get me my cloak,” Alasdair said.

“And the wager?” Gavin asked.

“Get me my cloak, Gavin,” Alasdair said.

Gavin got it. Alasdair wrapped his bleeding hand in the end of his plaid, had his black horse saddled, and took it out of the gate at a gallop before the carter had finished cursing the last rider.