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For a heartbeat a cold thought rose in Iona. This could be her father’s work. He had baited a MacVey with a soft word before.

Then she thought of Coll, asking for his sister.

If this was true and she stayed behind the walls, Alasdair would die on a hillside asking for her. He would die thinking the last thing she ever said to him was a dare, and he would never know she loved him.

“Saddle my mare,” she said. Her voice came out steady, and she did not know where from. “And every horse that’s left.”

“My lady,” Agnes began, from the hall door.

“Every horse,” Iona said, louder. “Linen from the kitchen. The broth in a crock. Now.”

They ran. She had never seen this yard move so fast for her. A lad brought out her mare already saddled. A handful of the men who were left were mounting behind her: old men, lads hardly grown, and Dougal, the oldest of the men-at-arms, white about the mouth.

One of the older men walked his horse up beside the messenger and peered at him in the torchlight.

“I dinnae ken yer face,” he said.

“Ye wouldnae,” the messenger said. “I’m from the far crofts, past the head of the glen.”

“Leave him be,” the cut man said. “There’s folk up there none of us have ever laid eyes on. Are we going, or are we standing here?”

Iona swung herself into the saddle. Under her skirt the little knife was strapped to her leg, and she was glad of the weight of it.

Lady Mairead had come down the steps on Agnes’s arm. She put up her thin hand, and Iona bent from the saddle and took it. It was as cold as stone.

“Bring him home to me,” the lady said.

Iona could not answer her. She gripped the cold fingers hard, and let them go.

The messenger was already back on his blown horse, turning it for the north gate. Iona put her heels to the mare and went after him, out under the torches and onto the glen track, with the few men of the keep strung out behind her and the dark coming down off the hills to meet them.

Somewhere up there he was lying in a summer hut with a blade wound under his ribs, asking for her.

She had to reach him. She had to kneel by him and tell him she loved him, more than her name, more than her father, more than her own life. He could not leave her before she had said it. He could not leave her at all.

She leaned low over the mare’s neck and rode as she had never ridden in her life, and prayed with every stride that she would reach him.

18

Fear rode up the glen track with Iona, pressed so close against her back that she could feel it breathing, and every stride of the mare said the same thing: he was dying up there, and she had never once told him she loved him.

The track climbed out of the birches onto the open moor, pale between black slopes of heather, and the messenger rode ahead on his blown horse without once looking back. Behind her a lad called to another to keep up, and his voice cracked on it.

Six men had ridden out of the keep behind her: four grey-headed men from the wall and two lads hardly old enough to shave. The oldest of them, a man-at-arms called Dougal, brought his horse up to her shoulder.

“This is a strange road for a man riding to Dunmore, my lady,” he said.

“Then they carried him a long way to find a roof,” Iona said.

She would not think past that. She thought instead of his mouth on the inside of her knee that morning, and heat came up through her even here, on a cold moor in the dark, and it hurt worse than the fear did.

I love ye. Three words. She had said them to his mother and never to him. If he died in that hut before she could put them in his ear, she would never forgive herself, and she would never forgive God.

The moon came over the shoulder of the hill. By its light she saw the shieling at last: a low hut of turf and stone in a hollow among tumbled rocks, with a pen of piled stones beside it for the herds. A lantern burned in the doorway. No horse stood by the wall. No voice called out.

Iona was off the mare before it had stopped.

“Alasdair!” she shouted.