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The gate to the glen track stood shut again, and the few left in the yard stood about the cobbles with nothing in their hands. Agnes was at her elbow, talking about the fire in her room and a cup of something warm.

Mairead did not hear most of it. She was looking at the north gate.

He had come in by the north gate. Off the moor, down the glen track.

Her son had gone out by the south. She had stood at her own window that afternoon and watched the whole tail of them ride along the water toward Dunmore, with Gavin’s fair head last of all. A man hurt on the Dunmore road was not carried over the hills into the glen beyond. Nobody would carry a man with a blade under his ribs so far, and nobody would carry him up.

Alasdair would lie in the heather and bleed white before he called her into danger. She knew her son. For a long while she had forgotten that she did, and now it came back to her whole.

And the face. She had been Lady of this glen from the day Gregor brought her home to it, and there was not a croft between the loch and the head of the moor she had not carried broth to. She did not know that face, and he had said he came from the far crofts.

“Agnes,” she said. “Have them saddle me a horse.”

Agnes stopped talking.

“My lady?” she said.

“A horse,” Mairead said. “And my riding cloak.”

“Ye’ve no’ been on a horse since the old laird died.”

“Then the horse and I will learn it again together,” Mairead said.

Agnes’s mouth opened and shut. Her hand went to her keys and closed over them.

“Ye cannae, my lady. It’s no’ safe.”

“It wasnae safe for the lass either.” Mairead set her palm against the wall of the steps and stood up off the bench, and her knees held. “That man was no MacVey, Agnes. He came down the wrong road with the wrong words in his mouth, and every soul in this yard was too frightened to see it. My son is on the Dunmore road. Somebody must reach him before that stranger does, and tell him true.”

“Then send a lad,” Agnes said.

“The lads went with her,” Mairead said. “There’s nobody left but the men on the gate and the old women. So an old woman will go.”

A lad from the stable brought out a brown mare, small and broad, and stood at her head gaping as if the dead had walked into his yard. Agnes came running with the cloak. She put it around her lady’s shoulders with hands that would not keep still, and fastened it at the throat, and then she stood back with her face working.

“I’ll come with ye,” Agnes said.

“Ye’ll keep the keep,” Mairead said. “Ye’ve the keys. Ye’ve always had the keys. Keep a fire lit in the hall, and broth hot. There’ll be wounds to bind before morning.”

She put her foot in the lad’s linked hands and he heaved, and she was up. The saddle was hard and strange under her, and the ground very far away. Her heart was going faster than it had gone in a long while. She gathered the reins in her cold fingers and found that her hands remembered what to do with them.

She thought of the lass weeping into her lap that afternoon. That girl was up on the moor in the dark because she had believed a lie about him. Mairead had believed a peace once, and kissed her husband on these steps, and never seen him alive again.

She would not stand on the steps this time.

“Open the south gate,” she said.

The men on the gate looked at Agnes. Agnes looked at her lady, in the saddle with her back straight and her grey hair coming loose under the hood, and something in her broad face gave way.

“Ye heard her,” Agnes said, in a voice to carry to the wall. “Open it.”

They dragged the bar off. The gate swung out onto the road along the water, black loch on one side and black hills on the other, running away south into the dark.

Lady Mairead put her heels to the brown mare and rode out of her husband’s gate, alone, to find her son before a stranger in MacVey plaid could find him first.

19

Alasdair had ridden the whole of the Dunmore road with murder in his hands, and at the end of it there was nobody to spend it on.