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“They hit the river patrol at the ford, at first light,” Gavin said. “Men in dun cloth, out of the alders, same as before. Our lads are cut about, but they’re all walking.” He jerked his head back toward the yard. “And we kept one of them alive.”

Through the open gate Iona could see him. A man knelt on the cobbles of the yard with his hands tied behind him and a MacVey spear at his back. He wore plain dun cloth, no plaid and no badge. He was young, with a split lip and a beard he had not shaved in days. She did not know his face. He looked up, saw her red hair in the gateway, and dropped his eyes to the stones.

Her skin went cold all over in the sun.

“He had this sewn into his coat,” Gavin said, and held out a folded paper.

Alasdair took it. He opened it with one hand, and Iona saw the red wax at the foot of the page before she saw anything else.

There were only a few words above it, in a clerk’s square hand.

Let the bearer through, and ask him nothing.

Under them, pressed deep into the wax, was the boar.

“So his own folk at the border will let a man in no colours back over it,” Gavin said. “Nobody stops a man carrying that.”

Iona did not need to come closer. Her father’s seal. The same as on her letter.

And she knew now who had sent the archers to the road.

She pressed her palm flat to the warm stone of the wall and held on, and the anger came up through the sickness, so hot that her cheeks flamed with it. Every soft word. Every folded hand. “Endure,” he had told her, and sent his men out in dun cloth to burn a village with children asleep in it, and put his own seal on the paper that brought them home.

On the bench, Lady Mairead had gone still. She did not cry out. She only went quiet, and the colour went out of her cheeks, and her thin hands closed over the apples in her lap and stayed there. Agnes was at her side at once, her keys silent for once, helping her up.

“Come in now, my lady,” Agnes said. “Come in out of the wind.”

There was no wind. Lady Mairead went with her anyway, and did not look back at any of them.

The people in the gateway had begun to drift away. Nobody looked at Iona. She felt them not looking, every one of them, and it was worse than the spitting had ever been.

Alasdair stood with the pass in his hand. He had not moved. He was reading the line again, and the paper had begun to crush in his grip.

Then he looked up, and his face was a stranger’s. His eyes had gone flat and hard as iron, and the old scar stood out white on his jaw.

“Gavin,” he said. “Every man who can sit a horse. Armed. In the yard.”

“To talk, my laird?” Gavin asked.

“I’m done talking to him,” Alasdair said.

Gavin went. Alasdair turned, and found her by the wall.

“Yer father’s seal,” he said.

“I ken whose seal it is,” Iona said. Her voice came out raw. “I’ve kent it longer than you.”

He came close, his chest heaving. He did not touch her.

“I will destroy Dunmore once and for all,” Alasdair said.

She opened her mouth to fight him, and found no word for her father anywhere in her.

He went out through the gate, and she heard him roaring for his horse before he was halfway to the stables.

Iona stood alone among the windfalls. Alasdair was riding to Dunmore in a rage, with every man he had, straight to her father’s door.

She picked up her skirts and ran for the yard.