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“I’ll stay,” his mother said. “I’ve done my riding.”

He pressed his mouth to her hair. She touched his cheek for a heartbeat, and her eyes drifted past him, south, to the black water.

“Bring her home,” she said. “Yer father never got to come.”

“I’ll bring her home,” Alasdair said. “I swear it to ye, Mother.”

He turned for his horse, and as he swung into the saddle he prayed to God he would be let keep that promise.

• • •

He knew Dunmore’s habits as well as he knew his own sword. Archers in the rocks. Always the rocks, high and safe, with a clear run back over the top when the steel came up the slope.

So he did not ride up the track into the hollow. He left the horses in a fold of the moor with lads to hold them, sent Gavin around to the left with half the men, and took the rest up the right himself through the heather, with the moon gone down and the sky beginning to pale.

Above them the rocks stood black on the skyline. Below them, in the hollow, a lantern burned in the door of a hut.

She was down there. He could not see her, and every part of him knew it anyway, pulled toward that small yellow light as if somebody had tied a rope to his ribs.

The first arrow came out of the rocks exactly where he had known it would.

“Now!” Alasdair shouted, and went up the slope at a run.

His men went with him, roaring. The bowmen had their bows bent on the track, where a fool riding to his wife would have come, and they had to swing about to meet men coming out of the heather. One turned with an arrow still on the string. Alasdair struck the bow out of his hands and put his shoulder into him, and the man went over backward off the rock and was gone. From the left came Gavin’s yell, and his men poured over the top behind the archers.

For a few breaths it went as he had planned it. The bowmen in dun broke and scattered along the skyline.

Then the ground behind them filled with horses.

They came up out of the dead ground at the back of the hill, where no man in his senses would have hidden horses, a long dark line of them with spears levelled. That was not Dunmore. Dunmore never put his men anywhere they might have to stand and fight.

The archers had been bait, and he had turned his back to take it.

“Rally to me!” Alasdair roared. “To me!”

A rider came straight at him with the spear point low. Alasdair knocked it aside with his blade and the horse’s shoulder struck him and threw him into the heather. He rolled and came up with his sword still in his fist, and in the grey light he saw the man’s face. Big and red-bearded. He had sat at Alasdair’s own lower table and roared at every word his master said.

Leith’s man.

Leith, with his rings and his talk of an alliance against the riders in no colours. Leith, who had put his hand on Iona at supper. The understanding ran down Alasdair’s back like ice water.

The red-bearded man wheeled for another pass. Alasdair met him on foot, caught the spear shaft behind the point, and dragged. The man came out of the saddle, and Alasdair put him down in the heather and did not wait to see if he rose.

All along the slope his men were going down. A lad he had taught to hold a sword was carried off his feet by a horse. A man of his father’s day fell with a spear through his targe and lay still. The MacVeys fought back to back among the rocks, and the riders came through them again and again.

The spear came from his blind side as he cut a rider out of the saddle. He twisted, too late. The point went in low on his left side, under the ribs, and out again.

It was heat first, and then cold. He clamped his arm over it, and his hand came away wet and dark.

“Ye’re hit!” Gavin shouted, fighting his way to him.

“Then so are they,” Alasdair said through his teeth, and struck down the man who had done it.

A blade under the ribs. The lie had come true. Somebody up here had a wit for jokes.

Below him the lantern still burned in the hollow, and between him and it stood a ragged line of bowmen. He could not see her.

He did not need to. I’m coming, lass, he swore to her. I’ll have ye back in my arms, if I have to die on this hill to do it. He pressed his arm hard against his side and went down the hill toward the light.