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“Sit,” she said.

“I’m wet through, lass,” Alasdair said. “So are ye. Go and change.”

“I’ll change when I’ve seen to that hand.” She looked past him at the girl who had followed them as far as the door with a broom still in her hand. “Warm water. Clean linen. Now.”

The girl looked at Alasdair, and her lip curled. He let her see his face. She dropped the broom and ran.

“I said sit, MacVey,” Iona said.

“And I said go and change,” Alasdair said.

She came at him across the boards and pointed at the chair by the hearth as if he were a dog. He let his legs take him back into it, because the ride had found every ache in him, and she dropped to her knees in front of him and held out her hand for his.

The sight of her on her knees between his boots, her wet hair down her back and her face tipped up to him, put thoughts in his head that no man should have with a basin of water on its way. He gripped the arm of the chair and kept his hands there.

When the water came, she took his hand into her lap and began to unwind the end of his plaid from it. The wool had dried into the cuts. He hissed through his teeth when it pulled.

“Hold still,” she said.

“Then stop tearing at it,” Alasdair said.

“I’ve bound Coll’s hands after every fight he ever lost.” She wet the wool and eased it loose a little at a time, quick and cold and very sure. “He made less noise than ye do.”

The name went into him like a nail. He kept his hand where it was, in her lap, and watched her wash each knuckle clean while the water in the basin went pink. She turned his hand over to look at it in the firelight, and her thumb came to rest on the inside of his wrist.

His heart was pounding. She must have felt it there, under her thumb. She did not say so.

She tore the linen into strips with her teeth and bound his knuckles, firm and neat, and pulled the knot tight enough to make him wince.

“Next time ye want to hit something, MacVey,” she said, without looking up, “choose something softer.”

“I’ll bear it in mind,” Alasdair said.

Her hands stopped. She lifted her head, and her face was very close to his, flushed from the fire, with a faint brown mark still on her jaw where his blood had dried. Her mouth was swollen yet from his. Her green eyes went to his mouth and stayed there, and he felt his whole body lean toward her before he knew it had moved.

Then he saw her father in the shape of that jaw. He had never seen it before, and now he could not stop seeing it.

Alasdair wrenched his hand out of her lap. His knee caught the basin and it went over, and the pink water ran across the boards toward his ink.

“That’ll do,” he said, on his feet. “My thanks.”

She stared up at him with the wet linen ends in her fist. He walked out and left her there, kneeling in the spilled water, and he did not look back, because if he had looked back he would have gone down on his knees beside her.

• • •

He kept away from her all the rest of that afternoon. He rubbed down his black horse himself, so long that the stable boy stopped offering to help. On the wall Gavin looked at the white bandage and said, “That’s a fine knot, my laird. Somebody’s been kneeling at yer feet.”

“Leave it, Gavin,” Alasdair said.

“I’m only admiring it,” Gavin said, and went on admiring it until Alasdair left him there. When the light began to go, he found that his feet had taken him across the yard to the foot of the tower.

He climbed the stairs slowly. At the top, a thin line of firelight showed under her door. He could hear her moving on the other side of it, the creak of the chest lid, the soft sound of wool shaken out.

Alasdair raised his bound hand to knock.

It hung there. His knuckles throbbed under her linen. He could still feel her thumb on his wrist, and her mouth on the hill, cold and then warm, and the low sound she had made in her throat when he touched her face. He had pulled her into him by his own cloak and kissed her senseless, and she had bitten his lip for it. No woman had ever done that to him, and he had liked it more than anything he could remember.

And he thought of his father.