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“I said I’d trust ye if ye let me.” Her eyes burned, and she did not care who saw. “I never said I’d stand at a window and watch ye ride off to kill my father. Or take ye back into my bed with his blood on yer hands.”

“Is that what this is?” His eyes had gone dark as slate. “Ye’re feart of what comes home to ye.”

“I’m feart of what ye’ll be when ye come home.”

“And what will you be?” He bent until his breath was on her mouth. “Will I find my wife waiting, or the Dunmore I carried home on my saddle?”

It hit her like a fist under the ribs. She dragged in a breath and threw it back in his face.

“Ride out that gate today,” Iona said, “and find out.”

He took her face in his hand.

His palm was hot along her jaw and his fingers were in her hair, and he tipped her head back and bent to her, slowly, with every man in the yard watching. Her lips parted on their own. She rose up into him, shameless, furious, wanting it. His mouth was so near that she felt him breathe in.

Then his hand opened, and he let her go.

The cold came in where his palm had been. She swayed after it before she could stop herself.

“Keep inside the walls,” he said, and turned to his horse.

She stood on the cobbles with her nails cutting into her palms and her throat locked shut on his name, and watched him swing up. He did not look down at her. He gathered the reins and raised his arm, and the yard surged after him toward the south gate, where the Dunmore road ran away along the loch.

Gavin came last. He reined in beside her for a moment and looked down, and there was no grin on his face at all.

“I’ll bring him back to ye, my lady,” he said.

Then he was gone too, and the gate swung shut on the dust of them.

Iona went behind the stable wall where nobody could see her. She put her back against the stone and slid down it until she sat in the straw, and pressed her face to her knees, and sobbed until her ribs ached and she could not get her breath.

• • •

The afternoon would not end.

She did what she would have done at Dunmore. She went to the kitchen and saw the broth started and linen torn ready for binding, because men came home cut. The cook took her orders and said nothing. Not one of them met her eyes, and she knew why. A man in dun cloth had knelt in their yard with her father’s boar sewn into his coat.

She climbed to the wall walk and watched the Dunmore road until her eyes ached.

When the light began to yellow, she went to Lady Mairead’s door and knocked.

Agnes opened it. Her face had shut again, the way it had been in the first days, and she stood in the doorway with her keys in her fist as though she guarded a gate.

“She’s resting, my lady,” Agnes said.

“Let the lass in, Agnes,” Lady Mairead said from the chair.

Agnes looked at Iona a moment longer. Then she stood aside and went out past her, and drew the door closed behind her with great care, which was worse than a slam.

Lady Mairead sat at the window, wrapped in her shawl, looking at the loch with her hands still in her lap, and for a long while she said nothing at all. Iona sat on the stool at her feet and waited, and listened to her own heart.

“He went,” Lady Mairead said at last.

“He went,” Iona said.

“Gregor went out of that same gate.” The lady’s voice was so soft that Iona had to lean in to hear it. “Under a peace. He kissed me on the steps, and I told him to mind his bonnet.”

Iona’s throat closed. Her own father had been waiting at the end of that road, and she could not lift her eyes from the floor.