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“It’s no’ bad for the back end of the year,” Iona said. “Shall we go to the bench, my lady?”

They walked her down the path between them, very slow. Alasdair had gone into battle with less care than he took over every step of that path.

He did not see his people come. When they reached the bench under the south wall he turned, and found the gateway full of them, standing quiet.

Nobody spoke. They only looked at their Lady, sitting in the sun, and the looking went on so long that his mother put a hand up to her hair.

“Have they nothing better to do?” she asked.

“No, my lady,” Iona said. “No’ this morning.”

Agnes came through the gate last, with her keys swinging at her belt. She stopped dead on the path. Then her face crumpled, and she put her apron up over it and wept into it, loud and openly, with her broad shoulders heaving, in front of them all.

His mother watched her weep.

“Agnes,” she said. “Ye’ll rust yer keys.”

Somebody laughed, and the laugh ran along the path, and Agnes laughed too, wet and furious, behind the apron.

Murdoch had come to stand at Alasdair’s shoulder.

“I’ll put it in the ledger, my laird,” he said. “Under the day’s events.”

“Put it in large letters,” Alasdair said.

Iona had knelt in the grass at his mother’s feet and was picking up windfalls into her lap, the good ones from the bad. She was telling his mother something. He could not hear the start of it. He heard the end.

“And he yelped,” Iona said, “like a pup with its tail stood on. The great laird of the MacVeys.”

His mother looked up at him. Then she laughed.

It came out cracked and rusty, and it did not stop. She put her thin hand on Iona’s head, on the red hair, and laughed until her eyes ran.

“Gregor’s were the same,” she said. “Like stones out of the burn, every night of his life. I used to warm mine on his back to pay him out.”

“Then I’ll warm mine on his,” Iona said, and his mother laughed again.

Alasdair stood with his hands hanging at his sides and could not have moved if the wall had come down.

His mother sat in the sun with apples in her lap, and there was colour in her cheeks, and his wife knelt at her feet with grass on her skirt and her plait coming loose.

Nobody had laughed in this garden in all the time he could remember. His Dunmore wife had brought it back in one season.

His throat ached. He had to look away at the apple trees, and his eyes stung, and he let them.

Then Iona bent forward to reach a windfall, and her gown pulled tight across her back, and he remembered her above him with her hair down and her hands pinning his. The heat of it went straight down him, there in his mother’s garden in front of half his keep. He folded his arms and studied the wall with great care.

Iona glanced up at him over her shoulder, and her mouth curved. She knew exactly what he was thinking. The witch.

• • •

Iona had forgotten for a whole bright hour that she was a Dunmore, and the gate crashing back against the garden wall reminded her.

Gavin came through it at a run. There was blood on his sleeve, none of it his by the look of him, and he was not smiling. His lip was drawn back hard from his chipped tooth.

“My laird,” he said.

Alasdair had left the bench already. “Say it here.”