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“After, the lad buried his father. He was hardly grown. He stood at the grave with his mother barring her shutters behind him, and he didnae weep. He rode out that same night.” Hamish stirred the fire with his boot. “Then Dunmore rode back at us. All that winter it went on. A steading burned for a steading, a herd driven for a herd, a man in the ground for a man in the ground. I rode with him at the start of it. Then I’d had my fill, and I came down here to my sheep.”

“And the raid my brother died on,” Iona said. “Were ye there?”

“I wasnae on that hill.” He was quiet a while. “But I saw the laird the day after he came home from it, and I’ll tell ye this much. He never came down to this door before it, and he’s come every month after. Ask him, my lady. It’s his to tell, and he’s carried it alone long enough.”

Iona sat by his fire with her hands in her lap, and the shame hit her all at once, like a blow under the ribs.

She had called Alasdair a liar on his mother’s stairs. She had wept over her father’s letter like a child. Heat flooded her face, and then the tears came, hot and fast, and she could not stop them. She bent over her knees with her hands across her face and cried for every night she had defended him, until her breath came in ragged pulls and her ribs ached with it.

Hamish did not say anything kind. He got up and ladled broth from the pot into a wooden bowl and put it in her lap, and sat down again.

“Eat that,” he said. “Ye’ve a ride home, and a harder talk at the end of it.”

• • •

She had never ridden so fast in her life, or wanted so much to arrive.

The mare came in at the gate lathered. Iona slid off and went through the hall with her skirts in her fists and up to his chamber, and threw the door open so hard it struck the wall.

Alasdair stood by the bed with his sword belt in his hands, half buckled. He looked up. His face was white under the scar.

“I was wrong,” Iona said, before he could speak. “About my father. About all of it. I called ye a liar on the stairs, and ye’d told me the truth from the first day. I’m sorry, Alasdair. I’m so sorry.”

He stood quite still. Then he dropped the belt on the bed.

“Where have ye been?” he said.

“With Hamish Gunn,” Iona said.

Something went across his face, fast, and was gone. He came toward her.

“Ye rode out alone,” he said, low. “With my village still smoking and Dunmore’s riders in every wood. I’ve had Gavin and half my men out looking for ye since the bell. I was going after ye myself.”

“I ken.” The tears were running down her face again, and she let them run. “I didnae ask ye because ye’d have answered me yerself, and I’d never have kent whose truth it was.”

“So ye trusted an old crofter over yer husband.”

“I trusted my own ears.” She stood her ground, so close she could see his pulse in his throat, and her face was wet and she did not care. “And now I’ll trust ye, MacVey, if ye’ll let me. Hamish wouldnae tell me about Coll. He says it’s yours.”

Her voice split down the middle. She caught hold of his shirt.

“Please,” she said. “Ye called it yer greatest shame. Say what it is, or I’ll go on thinking the worst thing I was ever told.”

He looked down at her hands on his shirt, and then into her face, and did not look away.

“He wasnae with yer father’s men,” Alasdair said. “Nobody kent he was on that hill. He’d come after them on his own, on a horse too big for him, with a sword off some wall. It was dark. My men saw steel coming at them out of the heather, and they answered it.”

Iona let go of his shirt. Her hand found the bedpost and gripped it.

“When it was done I found him. He was lying in the heather asking for his sister.” Alasdair’s voice had gone rough. “That’s how I kent who he was.”

The room tipped. She hung on to the bedpost with her mouth open and no air in her, and he went on, because he had begun.

“I put him up in front of me and rode for the healer down the glen. I held him against my chest the whole road and talked to him, so he’d stay awake. He was dead before we reached her door.” He stopped, and his jaw worked. “His sword went home with him. Yer father kent he carried it. And I never told ye, because ye’d have heard me blame a dead lad for his own death. The order to ride was mine. Whatever he carried, he died on my raid.”

Coll. Always running from trouble, and at the last he had run straight at it, alone, in the dark, with a sword he could barely lift. And her father had sworn to her, year after year, that the boy never drew a blade.

A sob tore out of her, loud and raw, and then another on top of it. She could not stop them. They came up from somewhere under her ribs and bent her over the bedpost, and she heard herself saying her brother’s name between them.