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There was a lad sitting against the wall of the nearest house, with his arm held out stiff in front of him and the sleeve burned onto it. A thin woman knelt by him, trying to wrap it in a rag that was more soot than cloth. Iona went down on her knees in the mud beside them.

“Let me,” she said. “I’ve done this before.”

The woman did not know her, and let her. Iona tore a long strip from the hem of her shift. She eased the sleeve away where it would come, and left it where it would not, and wrapped the arm loose and clean, talking to the lad about nothing. He had freckles across his nose. She did not let herself look at them for long.

“There,” she said. “Keep it out of the dirt, and dinnae let anybody pull at it.”

A shadow fell across her.

A man stood over her, tall and stooped, with his shirt scorched brown down one side and his hands black with ash to the wrists. His eyes were red and wild in a face gone grey with smoke.

“I ken that hair,” he said. “Ye’re the Dunmore.”

The thin woman scrambled back from her as if Iona had caught fire.

Iona got to her feet. “I’m binding his arm,” she said.

“Get away from him!” He shoved her away from the lad with both hands.

She stumbled back into the tail of a cart. Its iron edge tore through her sleeve and laid open the arm beneath.

For a moment she felt nothing at all. Then the cut began to burn. She clapped her palm over it and felt the blood come warm between her fingers.

All along the track people had stopped to watch, and nobody moved to help her. A woman by the well said, “Dunmore,” quietly, as if she were naming a sickness.

“Yer father’s work!” the man shouted at her. His voice broke on it. “My house, with my wee ones asleep under the thatch. And ye come down here after and put yer hands on ours?”

Iona’s throat closed. She pressed her lips together hard, and held her arm, and stood her ground against the cart. She would not let one tear fall in front of these people.

She did not see Alasdair cross the track. He was simply there, between her and the man, and he had the front of that scorched shirt in his fist.

“Neil MacKay,” Alasdair said.

The man went still.

“Look at me, Neil.” Alasdair’s voice was low, and it carried to every soul on that track. “Ye’ve lost yer house. I’ll have it built again by my own men before the frost, and ye’ll sleep in my hall till it is. But ye’ll no’ lay a hand on my wife. No’ today, and no’ ever.”

“She’s his blood, my laird,” Neil said. “Ye ken what he…”

“She’s Lady MacVey.” Alasdair let go of the shirt, and swung around, and roared it down the length of the village. “Hear me, all of ye! She rode out here when she could have sat by my fire. She was on her knees in yer mud with that lad’s arm in her lap, while ye stood and stared at her hair. Whoever came out of those trees with torches, it wasnae her. Any hand that’s raised to her is raised to me, and I’ll answer it in front of ye all.”

Nobody spoke. The woman by the well looked at her feet.

Neil MacKay’s face crumpled. He sat down in the track where he stood, with his black hands over his eyes, and wept without a sound.

Alasdair turned to her. He took her hand away from the cut, gently, and looked at it. His eyes went over the torn sleeve and the blood and came up to her face, and there was a fury in them she had never seen, and none of it was for her.

“It isnae deep,” she said. It came out thin. “Dinnae look at me like that.”

“Like what?” Alasdair asked.

“As if ye’d kill a man of yer own for it.”

“I nearly did,” he said.

He tied his own kerchief hard above the cut, and kept his arm around her waist all the way back to the mare. She did not knock it away. She hated that she did not.

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