Page 48

“See ye dinnae,” she said, without turning her head. “I’d have to scrub the rushes.”

She took her hand away. He felt the print of her fingers on his arm for the rest of the meal.

• • •

Iona’s thigh still crawled where Leith’s hand had lain, and she kept smiling at Laird Leith, as Murdoch had named him to her at the door, as if she had nailed the smile to her face.

She wanted to scrub at the place with her nails. Instead she ate mutton she could not taste, and listened to Leith talk about his salmon, and kept her eyes off the man beside her.

She could still feel Alasdair’s arm under her hand, hard as a bar of iron, the muscle jumping. He had been a breath away from putting a blade through a guest at his own table, and every soul in the hall had seen it. Her heart had not slowed since. Part of it was fear. The rest was something hotter that she had no business feeling with a fat laird’s breath still on her neck.

The cheese came, and the pipes, and more ale. Leith drank deep. A girl went along the dais filling cups. She filled Iona’s first, before the guest’s, and bobbed to her. When Iona first came, that girl would have sloshed it in her lap.

Leith set his cup down and leaned back with his hands laced over his belly, and every ring caught the torchlight.

“A word of advice, MacVey,” he said, loud enough for half the hall. “From a man who’s buried a wife and is looking for another.”

“I didnae ask for any,” Alasdair said.

“Ye’ll have it free.” Leith grinned around at the listening faces. “Put a son in that beautiful wife of yours, and soon. A wife with no bairn on her hip has time to look about her. And a bonny one like this will find some other man has stolen her away from under yer nose.”

His men laughed. The MacVey men did not. Iona felt the quiet spread down the hall from where she sat, and heat crawled up her neck.

Alasdair did not get up this time. He leaned back in his chair, easy, and smiled the slow smile.

“Any man who wants to steal my wife is welcome to try it,” he said. “He’ll find her in my bed, Leith, and me in it with her. And when she gives me a son, the lad will be a MacVey from the day he draws breath, and so will she. Nobody steals what’s mine.”

The MacVey men roared for him. Leith laughed and raised his cup, and called it spoken like a man with his work before him.

“Spoken like a man who finishes it,” Alasdair said.

The cheer went up again. Iona sat in the middle of it with her cup in her hand, and the warmth went out of her all at once.

When she gives me a son. He had said it over the cheese, to a man with rings on his fingers, as if he were talking about a mare he meant to put to his stallion in the spring. And they had cheered him. Nobody steals what’s mine.

She thought of last night, and his voice telling her there was no hurry in it. She had thought it was the two of them in that bed. Now she wondered whether the King had been in it too.

She set her cup down very carefully. Then she rose, bobbed to Leith with a face like a closed door, and went out of the hall before the piper had finished his tune.

• • •

She was standing at the hearth of his chamber with her arms folded when he came in.

He closed the door behind him and leaned on it. He was still smiling. Then he saw her face, and the smile went away.

“Ye left early, wife,” he said.

“I’d heard enough.” Iona did not unfold her arms. “Tell me something, MacVey, and tell me true. Is that what I am to ye? A belly for yer heir?”

He stared at her. “That’s Leith’s drink talking, lass, no’ me,” he said. “And ye didnae feel like a belly to me on my desk.”

“I’m no’ asking about Leith.” She came away from the hearth. “I’m asking about you. Ye sat in yer own hall and told the whole of it that ye’d get a son on me, as if I were a field ye meant to plant. And they cheered ye. Was last night a King’s bargain, kept? Was that what it was for?”

“Ye think that?”

“I think I’m the lass the King gave ye to make a peace,” Iona said. “And a peace needs a son. Ye could have got one on any woman the King handed ye.”

His jaw went tight under the scar. He came off the door and across the room, and she did not step back. He stopped so close that she had to look straight up into his face, and his eyes were dark grey in the firelight and furious.