Page 4

Then, low, so that he had to bend his head to hear it, she asked, “What will ye do with me, when we reach yer keep?”

Alasdair looked down at the top of her head, at the red hair under his chin and the pale curve of her neck where the rope of it fell aside.

“Whatever I please, lass.” He bent his mouth to her ear. “By the time we get there, ye may like it.”

She went stiff in his arm. Alasdair smiled over her head at the road, and let her wonder.

1

Her face was still burning. Whatever I please. Alasdair rode on as if he had said nothing at all, with his arm round her waist and his breath stirring the loose hair at the crown of her head, and Iona vowed she would never ask him anything again.

The track climbed between slopes of tumbled grey rock. Iona was working out how far it was back to Dunmore on foot when something hissed past her cheek and cracked against a stone.

Alasdair’s black horse threw up his head. Behind them, a man shouted.

Then Alasdair laughed.

She felt it against her back, and it frightened her more than the arrow had. “Dunmore,” he said. “I told Murdoch he’d never wait till we were home.”

“My father would never send men against ye,” Iona began. “He gave the King his word, in his own hall, before the whole…”

She did not finish. An arrow slammed into the saddle beside her knee and stood there humming. Another tore through his black horse’s mane, and the horse screamed and reared.

Alasdair’s arm tightened round her and he swung down from the saddle and took her with him, and her feet had barely touched the ground before he was running her off the track. A boulder stood at the edge of the slope, grey and furred with lichen, taller than a man. He pushed her down against it. Then he drew his sword and stood in front of her, his face to the rocks and his body between her and the arrows, so close that she was pressed between the cold stone and the hard wall of his back.

An arrow struck the top of the boulder and skittered away over her head. Another hit the ground a yard from her foot and stood there quivering. Alasdair did not flinch.

Iona could not breathe. Her face was against his back, against rough wet plaid that smelled of horse and rain, and her fists had closed in it without her telling them to. Under her cheek she could feel him breathing, deep and steady. Her own heart was going faster than she could count, and her knees had turned to water, and she hated that he could feel every bit of it.

“Are ye hurt?” he said, close above her ear.

“No,” Iona said.

“Then stay down. Whatever ye hear.” He looked back at her over his shoulder, and he was smiling, and there was a light in his face she had not seen in it at Dunmore. “Can ye do that, Iona Dunmore, or will ye run again?”

“They’re shooting at ye, MacVey,” she said through her teeth. “I’d sooner hand them the arrows.”

“Aye, well.” He glanced at the arrow standing in the heather by her shoe. “They’re no’ very good at it.”

Alasdair stayed where he was, in front of her, with his sword up and his feet set in the wet heather. “Take them from the left!” he shouted up the slope, without turning his head. “The rest of ye, round the right. Go!”

His men went past the boulder at a run, plaids flying and swords out, and threw themselves up the slope into the rocks. Iona saw it all over his shoulder. A MacVey man went down with an arrow in his thigh and got up again, roaring. Steel rang on steel somewhere above. Higher up, dark shapes were scrambling back over the top, and one archer lay very still in the heather with his bow beside him.

Her heart was slamming so hard she could feel it in her teeth. She pressed herself flat against the cold lichen and could not make her eyes close.

She did not see the thin man until his hand was in her hair.

He had come round the side of the boulder, out of Alasdair’s sight, with a beard full of rain and a long knife in his fist. He wound her hair round his hand and wrenched. Her head snapped back. Her scalp burned as if he had set it alight, and he was dragging her away from the stone into the open, with the knife coming round toward her throat.

“Alasdair!” she screamed.

She had never once said his name. To her he had only ever been the MacVey, the enemy of her house. It tore out of her before she knew it was there.

Alasdair turned, and he was on the thin man in a single stride. His left hand caught the wrist with the knife and twisted until the bone cracked. His right hand drove the sword in under the man’s ribs, up to the hilt.

The fist in her hair opened. Iona fell to her knees against the stone.

She was close enough to see the blood come. It was darker than she had thought blood would be, spreading through the thin man’s shirt and running down onto the stone. He made a small surprised sound. Alasdair pulled the blade free. Then the man’s knees went, and he fell sideways against the boulder, and slid down it until his head lay in the heather against her skirts.