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The keys rang. “There’s clothes in the chest. The laird said ye came with nothing.”

“I came with what yer laird let me take,” Iona said, “which was the gown on my back.”

Agnes went out with her keys ringing. Iona slammed the door after her so hard the latch jumped.

She knelt by the chest and opened it.

There were gowns inside, and she lifted them out one by one onto the floor. Every one was stained or torn, and most were both. The best was green wool, good once, with a dark stain down the skirt that no washing had moved, and a sleeve torn half away at the shoulder.

She sat back on her heels on the cold stone. Shame went hot up her face, as if the whole yard stood at the door to watch her find them. Then the shame turned to fury. Her fists clenched in the green wool until her nails bit her palms, and her eyes stung, and she would not let them fill.

She snatched up the worst of the others and hurled it at the door.

Her own gown was soaked and heavy with mud, and her teeth had begun to chatter. So she stripped with fingers that would barely work the laces, scrubbed her legs in the freezing tub, gasping, and put on the green gown. It was too short and too wide. She knotted the torn sleeve at her shoulder and wrapped the blankets round herself on top of it.

She sat on the edge of the bed in the near dark. “Ask yer gentle father,” he had said. Her father had sat with his hands folded and told her to endure. He would not send men into the rocks to shoot arrows at his own daughter’s back. She told herself so in the same plain words, over and over, until they stopped sounding like words at all.

Then she made herself look at the hearth again. Nobody swept old peats out of a grate by accident, and nobody chose the worst gowns in a house by chance. Agnes had done this, or the servants had, and they had done it on purpose.

She knew why. Her father’s men had killed their old laird, at the peace talks. Her father said their old laird had drawn steel first, and she believed him. But these people had carried their laird home dead, and now a Dunmore was sleeping under their roof. If a MacVey woman had come to Dunmore after Coll died, Iona would not have lit her fire either.

Understanding it did not warm her. Her stomach knotted, and anger burned under her ribs where the cold could not reach it. They wanted her to weep. They would not hear her do it.

Her throat had closed. She pressed the heel of her hand hard against her mouth and kept it there.

Below her the keep went in to its supper, loud with men’s voices. Nobody came up the stairs.

Iona lay down on the bed with the blankets to her chin and her face to the cold wall, and kept her hand where it was until the noise downstairs had died away. In the morning she would go down to that hall and ask for her fire again. She would ask every day, as loud as she had to, until one of them gave it to her.

• • •

Alasdair came in late from the stables and found Murdoch at the end of the long table with a cup of ale and the King’s letter beside it.

“The dead ones are past telling anybody anything, my laird,” Murdoch said.

Alasdair poured himself a cup. “Dunmore sends men who’ve no’ the wit to talk. He’s as regular as rain.”

“The lady doesnae think so,” Murdoch said.

“The lady thinks her father is a gentle soul who sits in his chair and grieves.” Alasdair drank. He could still see her at his black horse’s head in the rain, her green eyes blazing as if she would sooner have used the knife on him herself. “She’ll learn.”

“And while she’s learning?” Murdoch asked. “Has she what she needs, up there?”

“Agnes has the keeping of her,” Alasdair said.

“Aye,” Murdoch said, in his driest voice. “That’s what I was asking.”

Alasdair set his cup down hard enough to slop the ale. “I told them what she is. If they sulk at her for a night, she’ll survive it. She’s a Dunmore.”

Murdoch said nothing more, which was how he said most things.

She had screamed his name on the hill. Then she had tried to slap him for his trouble, and he had wanted her mouth so badly that he had nearly forgotten his men. He had not yet decided what to make of that.

He went out into the dark yard on his way to his own bed. At the foot of the tower he stopped and looked up. The narrow window at the top was black. No light showed there, and no smoke went up from the chimney into the cold, clear sky.

Asleep, he thought, and went on across the yard.

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