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“Yer greatest shame,” she said. “And that’s to be enough for me?”

“It isnae meant to be enough,” Alasdair said. “It’s only true.”

“Then ye’ll let me go home,” she said.

“No,” he said. “The wedding goes ahead. That hasnae changed.”

“What happened to him?” Her voice cracked and she made it hard again. “Ye ken how he died. Tell me.”

“I’ve told ye what’s mine to tell.” Alasdair picked up the pen and turned it once in his fingers, and put it down. “Ye’ll hear no more about yer brother from me.”

She stared at him. A whole night in that cold room she had lain awake making the speech she would make to him, and he had answered all of it in two breaths and shut the door on the rest.

“Then hear this,” Iona said. “I’ll never submit to ye. The King can drag me to the kirk, the church where they’ll marry us, and the priest can say what he likes over me. Ye’ll have my name on yer paper. Ye’ll never have me.”

“I’ve asked for nothing,” he said, “but that ye do what a wife does.”

He came round the desk.

He came on until she had to tip her head back to keep her eyes on his face, and then he took her chin between his finger and thumb and tipped it up the rest of the way. Iona struck his hand off. He caught her wrist before she could pull it back, and held it there, pinned against his own chest.

She did not step away. She put her chin up and held her ground, and the heat of him came off his body and through his shirt, through the thin green wool of her own gown, hotter than the fire. Under her trapped hand his heart beat slow and steady, and hers went like a drum. She hated it for that. He smelled of ink and horse and smoke. His eyes were grey as a winter loch, and they were laughing at her.

“Let go of me,” Iona said.

“When ye’ve heard me out,” he said.

“And what does a wife do,” she said, “in this house?”

“She sits at my table. She keeps my keys, if she can get them off Agnes.”

Agnes would part with those keys when they buried her with them, Iona thought, and perhaps not then.

He was looking down at her mouth. “She stands beside me in the hall when I’ve folk to meet. That’s all.”

“I’ll sit at yer table,” Iona said. “I’ll stand in yer hall. But I’ll never share yer bed. Not for the King, not for my father, and never for ye.”

His eyes came up from her mouth to her eyes, and he smirked at her. His thumb moved over the inside of her wrist, where the pulse was racing, and he let her feel him find it.

“My bed,” he said, low. “Ye’ve thought about it, then. Ye’ll share it, lass, and it’ll no’ be the King that puts ye in it. Ye’ll come to it on yer own two feet.” He bent his head until his mouth was a breath from her ear. “And ye’ll be begging me for it soon enough.”

The blood roared up into her face. Every cold hour in that tower, every gob of spit on the cobbles, and now this, said low and easy, with his hand on her pulse to prove it.

Iona wrenched her wrist out of his grip. Her free hand went out sideways and found the inkwell on the desk. She snatched it up and hurled it down at his feet with all the strength she had, and it cracked against the boards and burst. The ink ran out of it black and wide across the floor, over the boards he kept so clean, and into the cracks between them.

• • •

The ink kept coming. Alasdair watched it reach the toe of his boot and go round it.

He did not move his foot. She was breathing hard in front of him with her hand still out where she had thrown, and her face had gone red to the hairline, and her green eyes were wet and furious at once.

He had said it to make her angry. It had worked better than he had any right to expect, and now she stood a hand’s width from him with her breast rising and falling under the thin green wool, and he wanted to put his mouth on hers more than he had wanted anything in a long while. He kept his hands at his sides. Murdoch, he thought, would have something to say about the floor.

“Beg?” she said. “I’d sooner beg the hangman. I’d sooner beg the Devil himself. Ye think because the King has given me to ye that I’ll come crawling when I’m cold enough or lonely enough? I’ll die in yer tower first, MacVey. I’ll die there and ye can write and tell my father.”

She shoved him in the chest with both hands. He gave her one step, no more, and let her think it was hers.

He let her rage. He had earned some of it, and he knew it.