Page 52

She opened it on her knee. The candle flame shook, or her hand did.

She knew it by heart. Every line asked her to wait, and endure, and do nothing to anger him, and every line promised to set her free.

She read it anyway, slowly, and this time she heard Alasdair’s voice under every word, on his mother’s stairs with her fist knotted in his sleeve.

A lie, he had called it. All her life, a lie.

Riders at the ford. A village burned to black ribs, and Neil MacKay’s hands. And in the same week a letter from a man who never raised his voice.

She pressed her other hand flat to her stomach. Her father had always told her that Coll died with no sword in his hand. Her father had told her a great many things.

And Alasdair had never once told her otherwise.

That was the thing that would not lie still. He had called that raid his greatest shame. He had thrown her father’s treachery in her face on his mother’s stairs and never softened a word of it. He was not a man who spared her anything.

So why had he never said what happened to Coll?

A man who called a thing his shame and would not say what the thing was. Her throat tightened until it hurt. Either it was worse than anything her father had told her, or it was something else altogether, and she did not know which of the two frightened her more.

Her father had told her to burn it.

She held a corner of the letter to the flame. The edge browned and curled. She snatched it back and pinched out the spark between her finger and thumb, and it stung.

She folded it along its creases and laid it deep in the chest again, under the old gown, and shut the lid on both of them.

• • •

He was awake when she came in. He lay in the big bed with the covers at his waist and his arms behind his head, and the firelight ran over his bare chest and shoulders. He watched her drop the latch.

“Ye were a long while in yer tower,” Alasdair said.

“Were ye keeping watch on me, MacVey?”

“I’m the laird. I ken where everybody in this keep is.” His mouth curved. “My wife, most of all.”

She turned her back on him and unlaced the grey wool. She felt his eyes on every lace, and let the gown fall, and stood in her shift. Then she sat on the edge of the chest and took the pins from her hair and unwound the plait, slowly, combing it loose with her fingers until it hung to her waist. Behind her, she heard him stop breathing.

Good, she thought.

She climbed into the bed on her own side, and kept to the edge of it.

He did not let her keep it. His arm came across the bed and hauled her back against him, her spine to his chest, his hand spread flat on her belly through the linen.

“Yer feet are like ice,” he said.

“Then let go of me,” Iona said.

“I’d sooner warm them.”

His mouth found the back of her neck, under her hair, and then her shoulder where the shift had slipped. Heat went down through her so fast her toes curled against his shins. She turned in his arms to tell him what she thought of his warming, and he kissed her before she could say it, slow and deep, his hand at her jaw holding her where he wanted her.

She kissed him back. She had meant to fight him for it and found she was fighting only herself.

When he drew back she put her palm on his chest and held him off.

“Last night ye stopped in the middle of something,” she said. “Since the day at the stream. Finish it.”

His eyes were open in the firelight, and for a moment there was nothing in them she could read.