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Afterward he slept.

Iona lay with her head in the hollow of his shoulder and listened to him breathe, deep and even, and could not close her eyes.

Somewhere below, the last of the pipes had stopped. His hand was spread at her waist as if he had fallen asleep holding on. Under the same roof, Archibald Leith was sleeping off his ale.

On her thigh, under the blanket, she could still feel the print of his rings.

She pressed closer to Alasdair and pushed the thought away.

Since the day at the stream, I’ve…

She turned it over in the dark, and every time it stopped in the same place. He had looked at her with his face wide open, as if he were about to hand her something he had kept locked up all his life. Then he had shut the lid on it and smiled, and called her grand, and said he would keep her.

Like his keep. Like his horse.

She raised herself on her good elbow and looked at his sleeping face, the white scar and the mouth gone soft, and her heart turned over.

What had he been about to say?

14

Alasdair had held his wife all night and nearly told her the thing he had never told anyone, and by morning the shame of wanting to say it sat in his chest like a swallowed stone.

Leith’s men were saddling in the yard, cursing their sore heads, and the keep was busy at its morning work around them.

He walked away from all of it, to his mother’s rooms.

His mother’s door stood ajar. He knocked anyway.

“Come in, Alasdair,” she said.

He stopped with his hand on the wood. “How did ye ken it was me?”

“Ye knock as if ye’re asking the door’s pardon,” his mother said.

She sat by the window with the shutters wide and her shawl drawn close. An empty cup stood on the chest beside her. Beyond the glass the loch lay flat and pale, with the mist coming off it in long threads.

He had meant to ask if she had eaten, as he always did, and go. Instead he looked at the stool. Iona had left it close by the chair, where she sat to hold those cold hands. He pulled it over and sat on it, and his knees came up nearly to his chest.

His mother looked at him for a long moment.

“Ye’ve no’ sat on that stool since ye were small enough to fit it,” she said.

“It’s shrunk,” Alasdair said.

“It’s the same stool, son.” Something like a smile touched her mouth. “Ye’ve grown.”

He laughed, short and surprised, and set his hands on his knees. The knuckles Iona had bound were healed to pink lines now, and he rubbed his thumb along them until he saw his mother watching him do it.

“Yer father sat like that,” she said, “when he’d broken something of mine and had to tell me.”

“I’ve broken nothing,” he said.

“Then say what ye came to say.”

He looked at the floor between his boots. His throat had closed, and he had to force it open.