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Iona woke angrier than she had ever been in her life, and the anger was the only warm thing in that room.

Nobody came up the stairs in the morning either.

She waited until the dawn at the window had gone white. Then she got off the bed with every joint stiff from the cold. Her breath hung white in the air of the room. She looked for her own gown. It lay where she had dropped it on the floor, the mud dried on it in a crust and the hem still dark with wet. She could not go down in that. So the gown from the chest stayed on, with its stain down the front and its torn sleeve knotted at her shoulder, and she dragged her fingers through her hair and plaited it so tight it pulled at her temples. Her stomach was hollow. She had eaten nothing after the bread at Dunmore yesterday morning, and she would not ask for that either.

She had worked it out in the night, lying with her face to the wall. A keep this size did not forget its laird’s bride. Agnes had not lost the way to the tower. They had left her cold and hungry on purpose, so the Dunmore woman would learn her place on the first night, and the man who had brought her here had let them.

She would freeze in that room before she went begging a MacVey for a peat. But she would have their respect, and she would have it from the man who had stood in the yard and told them to give it.

The stairs were dark and smelled of damp stone. She went down them with one hand on the wall and crossed the yard without looking at the well. In the hall two girls were clearing the long table. One of them saw her and said, loud enough to carry, “Mind the silver. The Dunmore’s up.”

The other one laughed into her sleeve.

Iona stopped dead and looked at them. She looked until the laughing girl dropped her eyes to the table and the first one went red to the ears. Then she walked on.

She did not ask either of them where their laird was. She had run a keep from girlhood, and she knew where a laird kept his papers: behind the hall, away from the kitchen smoke, in whatever room had the best light. She found a passage at the back of the hall and followed it, and the last door along it stood half open.

It was a small square room with a window of real glass and a fire roaring in the hearth. Somebody had built that fire high and set the screen in front of it. Somebody had swept the floor, and polished the brass candlestick on the desk, and wiped the dust off the shelf of ledgers above it. It was the only room she had seen in the whole keep that anybody had cleaned. Fire enough here to roast a sheep, and not a spark for her.

Alasdair MacVey sat at the desk in his shirt, with his plaid thrown over the back of his chair and his sleeves pushed to the elbow. He had a pen in his hand and a letter half written in front of him, and a stone inkwell at his elbow. Iona shoved the door so hard that it banged back against the wall, and strode in. He looked up, and set the pen down.

“Ye’ve come a long way down from yer tower, lass,” he said. “Did ye miss me in the night?”

“I’d sooner miss the plague,” Iona said. She stopped in front of the desk. The warmth of the fire reached her through the thin green wool and she would not move toward it. “I want a word with ye, MacVey.”

“Only one?” he said. He let his eyes travel slowly down her and up again. “A pity. I’d hoped ye came down for more than talking.”

Heat crept up Iona’s neck, and she would not let him see it. He wanted her flustered, and he would count it a win if she was.

“Yesterday ye stood in yer yard and told yer people I was to be their lady.” She held her hands together in front of her so he would not see them shake with cold. “A man spat at my feet by the well. Another did it at the tower door, and told me to mind where I stepped, and somebody behind me laughed at it. Yer housekeeper looked through me as if I were a draught. And ye let go of my arm and went to see to yer horses.”

He leaned back in the chair, his forearms folded across his chest, and let her go on.

“I am to be yer wife by the King’s order,” Iona said. “I didnae ask for it, and I dinnae want it, but I’ll not be spat on in the house I’m made to live in.” She took a step nearer the desk and held his eyes. “Ye’ll give me respect in this house. Ye’ll go into that hall today and tell yer people so, in words they cannae pretend not to have heard.”

Alasdair laughed.

It was a short, hard laugh. He looked down at his letter and then up at her again, and his eyes had gone very cold.

“Respect,” he said. “For a Dunmore, in this house? There’s no soul under this roof who owes yer family that. Murderers get none here, lass, and they’ll get none from me.”

The word hit her low in the stomach, hard as a fist. For a heartbeat she could not breathe. Then the blood came roaring up into her face and she slammed both hands flat on his desk, so hard the pen jumped, and leaned over it into his face.

“Murderers,” she said. “Ye can say that word to me? My brother was fifteen. He was a boy with holes in his sleeves who couldnae sit still through a meal. Yer men came over the hill and cut him down. And ye sit in yer warm room with yer fire and yer clean floor and call a Dunmore a murderer?”

“Yer father put mine in the ground,” Alasdair said, and he was on his feet. “Dinnae come in here and teach me what a Dunmore is.”

“And ye paid him back with a boy!”

She had wanted him to shout her down. She had been ready to fight him across that desk until one of them broke.

He did not shout. He looked at her across the desk for a long moment, and the old scar stood out white against the dark stubble on his jaw.

“That raid was mine,” Alasdair said. “I gave the order for it. Of all the things I have done, it is my greatest shame, and I’ll not stand here and tell ye otherwise.”

Iona straightened up off the desk. Her palms stung. She had come down the stairs with a fight in her, and he had knocked the floor out from under it with one quiet sentence, and she hated him for it more than for anything he had shouted.

A brute she could have hated cleanly. A man who called it his shame was harder to hold.