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Nobody answered. The messenger had reined in at the lip of the hollow, and he sat his horse there, very still, and did not come down.

Then the rocks stood up.

Men rose out of the stones on every side of the hollow, all at once, a dozen of them or more, with bows bent and the moon running along the arrowheads. Every one of them was dressed in dun, and not a badge among them. The six behind her were caught on the lip of the hollow with arrows on them from three sides.

“Down off yer horses,” one of them called. “Swords in the heather.”

One of the two lads dragged his sword out. Dougal swung his horse in front of the boy and roared at him to put it up, and for a long breath Iona thought he would not. Then the bowmen came a step nearer down the slope. Dougal threw his own sword down first. The three old men let theirs fall into the heather after it, and the lad’s went last, with a sound like a sob.

The men in dun pulled her six down off their horses and herded them into the stone pen where the cattle stood in summer. Iona heard Dougal cursing them until his voice cracked. Nobody laid a hand on her. Nobody even came near her. That frightened her more than all the bows together, because it meant she was expected.

The lantern moved in the doorway of the hut, and two men came out of it into the moonlight.

The first was heavy in the shoulders, with a grey beard cut close to his jaw. He came slowly, as he came down the length of his own hall, and he stopped a few paces from her and folded his hands over his belly.

Iona went still.

Her breath stopped in her chest and would not come again. She knew the walk before she knew the face, the slow heavy tread she had listened for outside her door since she was a child. It could not be him. He was at Dunmore, behind his own gate, where Alasdair had ridden to find him. Her hands had gone cold to the fingertips, and she could not make her feet move back from him, nor forward, nor anywhere.

“Iona,” her father said. “Ye came quick, lass. I kent ye would.”

The cold went up her from her feet to her scalp. Her eyes went past him to the dark door of the hut, and the hut was empty. There was no wounded man in it, no blood, no husband. She had known it on the track. She had known it in the yard. She had ridden anyway.

“Where is he?” she said.

“Riding hard for Dunmore,” Torquil said, “to find my gate barred and my hall empty. He’ll have a long night of it.”

The second man came up beside him, handsome once and gone soft under a fine cloak, and the lantern light caught on every ring on his fingers. Iona’s skin crawled before her mind had put a name to him. She knew those hands from Alasdair’s table.

“Ye’ll remember Laird Leith,” her father said. “He tells me ye sat by him at supper.”

“My lady.” Leith bowed, and his eyes went over her. “I said at MacVey’s table I’d keep ye in silk.”

“Ye said a great deal at his table, my laird,” Iona said. “My husband’s dirk heard most of it.”

“Laird Leith has been a good friend to Dunmore,” her father said, in that soft voice he never raised. “Men when I needed men. Silver to feed them. He asked one thing of me in return, and I’ve promised it him.”

He let her wait for it.

“You,” Torquil said.

The ground tipped under her. Her mouth went dry, and the blood rang in her ears so loud that the moor went far away.

“I’m married,” she said. “The King himself ordered it.”

“Married to a MacVey who’ll no’ see the morning.” Her father looked toward the lip of the hollow. “The lad who brought ye will tell him where ye are. Yer husband will come for ye, and he’ll die in the rocks. Then ye go to Leith.”

Up on the rise, the messenger turned his horse and went away down the glen track at a canter. Iona watched him go until the dark took him, and she could not make a sound.

Then she found one.

She stepped up to her father and spat in his face.

It caught him on the cheek above the grey beard. He did not flinch. He took a kerchief from his sleeve and dabbed it away, unhurried, as if a bird had marked him.

“I sat at Hamish Gunn’s fire,” Iona said. Her voice went raw, and she let it. “I ken what ye did at that table.”

He folded the kerchief.