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“Coll died asking for me,” she said. “And ye sat in yer chair and told me he never lifted a blade.”

“Ye were a child,” Torquil said.

“I was his sister!” She came a step closer, near enough to see the grey in his lashes. “Ye burned a village with bairns asleep under the thatch. Ye stole beasts at the ford in no colours. Ye swore in a letter, on my mother’s grave, that ye’d free me.”

“I have,” Torquil said. “Ye’re free of him.”

“This is what ye call free?” Iona said.

“It was always the way, lass,” he said.

“And the archers on the road.” The words stuck. She forced them out. “I was on his horse. Ye could have killed me. Did ye ken that, when ye sent them?”

He looked at her for a moment as he looked at a column of figures that would not come out right.

“They were sent for him,” her father said, “no’ you.”

It struck her harder than any blow could have. She swayed where she stood. Cold sweat broke along her back and her stomach rolled, and for one terrible moment she thought she would be sick in the heather at his feet.

“If they’d been better archers,” he said, “ye’d have been a widow before ye were a wife, and Leith would have had ye without all this trouble.”

“Ye’re no father of mine,” Iona said.

“I’m the only one ye’ll get,” Torquil said.

Leith came forward then. He caught her by the shoulder and dragged her in against his cloak, and put his ringed hand under her chin and tipped her face up to the lantern, and the rings were cold, and she could smell wine on him.

Iona drove both hands into his chest and shoved with all her weight. He gave a step and no more, and his fingers bit into her shoulder and held. She twisted in his grip and brought her heel down hard on his foot, and he grunted and dragged her closer.

“Ye’ll learn manners at Leith, my lady,” he said. “I’ve an empty chair at my table and a bed that wants a wife in it, and sons out of her, one a year. I’m a patient man. I’ll have the MacVey scrubbed off ye before the snow, and ye’ll thank me for the scrubbing.”

Her stomach heaved. She jerked her face out of his fingers and wrenched her shoulder free of his hand.

“Lay that hand on me again, my laird,” Iona said, “and I’ll take the fingers off it. Ask my husband how he liked it the last time.”

“Yer husband,” Leith said, smiling, “will be under a cairn.”

“Tie her hands,” her father said. “Gently, mind. She’s worth silver.”

A man in dun stepped behind her and caught her arms. Iona flung herself against his hold. She drove her elbow back into his ribs and heard the breath go out of him, and she kicked and twisted and fought for every inch, until a second man took her by the other arm and the two of them held her still between them. A cord went around her wrists in front of her, drawn snug and knotted, and they stepped away again, breathing hard. Nobody touched her skirts. Nobody thought to. The small knife lay strapped high against her thigh, and she felt the weight of it with every breath.

Not yet. There were bows on the old men in the pen, and a lad among them who had already tried to draw. One knife against all this would only get them killed.

They sat her in the doorway of the hut on a heap of old heather. Her father went back inside to the lantern. Leith stood at the edge of the light with his thumbs in his belt and watched her.

Iona fixed her eyes on the dark glen below.

Somewhere down there a stranger in MacVey plaid was riding to find her husband, to tell him his wife was waiting for him in the hills. Alasdair would come. He would not stop to think. He would come up this track with his blood up and every man he had, straight into the rocks, and the bows would rise out of the stones as they had risen for her.

She saw it as if it were already done. The arrows going into him before he could draw. His black horse down in the heather. His grey eyes open on the moon, and nobody near to close them. Her stomach clenched so hard she bent over her bound hands, and her heart went so fast it hurt, and she could not get enough air into her chest to cry out.

And he would die there without ever hearing her say it.

She closed her bound hands on the cord until her knuckles ached, and stared at the dark until her eyes burned.

• • •

Lady Mairead had watched one man ride out of that keep to his death, and she found, on the bench at the top of the hall steps with the torches hissing in the wind, that she would not sit in a chair and wait for another.