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“There,” Leith said, and eased his grip enough to let her drag in a breath. “That’s a lass learning.”

Now. Iona brought the knife up out of her skirt and slashed it across the back of his hand.

Leith yelled and snatched the hand away. It was a shallow cut and a long one, and blood ran bright over his knuckles and down among the rings.

Her father’s grip went slack on her arm for a heartbeat. She tore free of it and backed against the wall of the hut with the little knife held out in front of her, point up. Her arm burned to the shoulder. She held it out anyway.

“Next time,” she said, “it’ll be yer throat, my laird. Come and see.”

Leith’s face mottled with blood. He flung the drops off his fingers, and something ugly came into his eyes, and he came for her again with the bleeding hand reaching.

A roar went up at the lip of the hollow.

The line of bowmen broke apart. Steel came through it like a storm through standing barley. A man in dun was flung back into the lantern light with his bow snapped in two and fell at Iona’s feet. Another threw his bow away and ran screaming for the rocks. A third went down under a blade too fast for her to see, his arrows spilling across the turf, and through the gap they left came Alasdair.

He was on foot, his plaid torn half off his shoulder. His left arm was clamped hard against his side, and from under it the blood ran dark down his shirt to the knee. His sword was in his right hand.

He came down into the hollow, and his eyes found her across it, at once, as if there were nobody else there at all.

Iona’s breath broke out of her in a sob. He was alive. He was walking. And he was bleeding as she had never seen a living man bleed, and every drop of it was for her.

Leith stopped. He looked from her to the MacVey laird, and then he laughed out loud, and drew his sword with the hand she had not cut.

“Look at him, Torquil,” Leith said. “Come all this way to bleed on my boots. I’ll have his wife and his head both before breakfast.”

Her father did not hurry. He drew the long knife from his belt and turned it once in the lantern light, and smiled his soft smile.

“Ye were always too quick, MacVey,” Torquil said. “Yer father was the same.” He stepped out beside his friend.

Two men stood between her and her husband, and her husband could barely hold himself upright.

Iona tightened her fingers on the little knife until the handle bit into her palm.

20

Alasdair saw his wife alive, with her back to the wall of the hut and blood on her knife, and the fury that came up through him was so fierce it burned the pain clean out of his side.

She was white to the lips. Her plait had come half loose, and her small knife stood out in front of her, point up, red along the blade. None of the blood was hers. He saw that, and he saw the long cut across the back of Leith’s hand, and something that had been clenched tight in his chest since the Dunmore road let go.

Her gaze went to his shirt, to the wet dark of it, and she said his name as if it had been torn out of her.

He did not go to her. He came down the slope wide of the two men, along the wall of the stone pen, and Leith was slow turning on his cut hand. Before either of them could close the gap Alasdair was past their shoulders, with his back to her and the hut wall and his sword between her and the rings. He set his feet in the turf.

“Behind me,” Alasdair said.

“Ye can barely stand,” Iona said at his back, and her voice broke on it. “Fall down in front of him, MacVey, and I’ll never forgive ye.”

Even now. Bleeding, with two blades in front of him, and she was scolding him at his back like a fishwife. A laugh broke out of him, short and helpless, and hurt like the devil. God, he loved her.

“Then I’d best stay up,” Alasdair said.

Leith had his sword up. The cut hand hung at his side and dripped on the turf. He looked at the blood running down Alasdair’s shirt to the knee, and he smiled.

“Ye’ve walked a long way to die at her feet,” Leith said.

“Ye put yer hand on my wife,” Alasdair said. “At my table, and now here. Come and pay for it, my laird.”

Leith came in fast, faster than a man with that belly had any right to. His first cut came high, at the head. Alasdair took it on his blade, and the shock of it ran down his arm and into the hole in his side, and the hollow went white for a heartbeat.