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He stared at her. Blood was beading on his lower lip. He licked it away, slowly, and his eyes never left hers.

“An annulment,” he said. “Ye ken what that needs, lass?”

Her face flamed. She knew. An annulment needed a marriage that had never been bedded, and theirs had not been. He had not taken her maidenhead, not even on that desk a moment ago, and they both knew how near he had come to it.

“I ken exactly what it needs,” Iona said. “Keep yer hands to yerself, and ye’ll keep me.”

He laughed then, rough and startled, with his own blood on his teeth. “Ye bit me to win an argument.”

“I bit ye because ye deserved it.”

“Then I’ll deserve it again.” His voice dropped. “Soon.”

She turned her back on him before he could see what that did to her. She stepped over the candlestick and the ledgers and the new ink spreading black across the scrubbed boards, and wrenched the door open.

Murdoch was in the passage, a sheaf of papers under his arm and his hand raised to knock. He looked at her face. He looked past her at the floor of the room. He looked at his laird’s bleeding mouth.

“I’ll come back after dinner, my laird,” Murdoch said. “Perhaps with a broom.”

Iona walked away down the passage with her head high and her knees like water. Behind her she heard Alasdair laugh again.

She went straight to the kitchen. The broth was not burned. The cook looked at her flushed face and her loose plait, and at the ink on her hem, and said nothing at all, which was the greatest kindness anyone had done her in that keep.

• • •

The letter came at dusk, when she was back in the tower with the fire lit and her body still humming like a struck bell.

The firewood boy brought it. He held it out at arm’s length, as if it might bite him.

“A carrier left it at the gate, my lady,” the boy said. “He wouldnae come in.”

“Did he give a name?” Iona asked.

“No, my lady. He said ye’d ken the seal.”

She knew it. The wax was red, and pressed into it was the Dunmore boar, the one that had hung over the hearth of her father’s hall all her life. Her heart turned over at the sight. She sent the boy away and stood by the fire with the letter in both hands, and for a long moment she could not break it.

Then she did. Her father wrote small and careful, the way he spoke.

My dear Iona,

Word travels, even to Dunmore. I hear they have shamed you, and that he keeps you in a tower like a prisoner. I know what that man is. I knew it when I let you go, and it has broken my heart every day since. Be patient, my lass. Endure, as I asked you. Do nothing to anger him. I will find a way to free you from him. I promise you that, on your mother’s grave. Burn this when you have read it.

Your loving father, T.

She read it to the end, and then she read it again from the start, and her throat closed.

He had not forgotten her. He was sitting in his chair with his hands folded, grieving for her, the way she had pictured him on the hill. The tears came and spilled over, and she let them, since nobody could see.

Then she wiped her face with the back of her hand and frowned at the page.

He keeps you in a tower. She had put herself in the tower. She had carried her own gowns up those stairs. Who had told him that much, and told it so wrong? And what did an old man with no men behind him mean to do, to free her from a marriage the King had made?

She did not burn it. She folded it along its creases and knelt by the chest, and put it at the very bottom, under the old green gown with its torn sleeve. She shut the lid and sat back on her heels.

The room was warm. The fire was well laid. Her mouth was still tender from his, and there was a bruise on the back of her head from his shelf, and when she shut her eyes she could feel his hands on her hips as if they were still there.

This was meant to be her prison. He was meant to be the man she would hate until she died. She had sworn it on Coll’s name.