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Alex tilts the blade. Another bead of blood slides down Ewan’s throat and vanishes into the collar of his shirt.

“Sorry, what was that?”

“I understand,” Ewan croaks.

Alex holds him there a moment longer, then releases his shirt with a small shove that sends him stumbling back.

He doesn’t sheath the dagger. Not yet.

For the briefest instant, I think he means to leave it at that.

Then Alex’s eyes flick to Ellen’s bloodied face, and he steps in once more and draws the blade in a thin, deliberate line across the cheek he struck Ellen on.

Ewan jerks with a hiss, one hand flying to his face.

It isn’t a deep cut, but enough that blood wells wildly there.

“A mark for a mark,” his tone low and lethal. “Another reminder in case the first one doesn’t stick.”

Alex wipes Ewan’s blood from the dagger on the front of Ewan’s coat and slides it back into place, as though marking a man is no great thing to him.

Taskill steps closer, folding his arms behind him as though they stand settling accounts, and not whether a body ought to be buried before dark.

“Ye’ve been warned before witnesses,” he says. “If Aileen comes to harm by yer hand, there will be no hidin’ behind a husband’s claim on his wife. We’ll ken where to look, and we’ll come.”

Aileen’s crying soundlessly. Not the broken weeping from before. Something quieter, as though her body rejects the idea that reprieve is possible.

Maeve goes to her.

She takes Aileen by the shoulders and draws her back, away from Ewan, away from the centre of the yard, and though Maeve’s own face is hard as iron, the hand she puts to Aileen’s cheek is gentle.

“Ye’ll stay here if you need it,” she says. “No one is takin’ you by force from this yard. D’you hear me?”

Aileen nods once, trembling all over.

Ewan sees it and makes as if to rush forward, but one look at Alex cures him of the thought.

James draws Ellen into his side with one arm and says, “If either of ye set foot here again with violence in yer head, ye’ll rue the day.”

“We’ll take our leave,” Patrick says quietly to Ewan.

He looks at Ellen again, and she looks back at him with blazing pain in her eyes. The blow to her face was cruel. The sight of her father seeing it and failing her is crueller.

He steps toward her once, but Ellen holds up a hand.

“Go,” she says.

He doesn’t argue.

Ewan wipes at the blood on his neck, then at the cut Alex left on his cheek, and looks at his own hand as though he can’t quite believe another man has marked him so easily. He looks at all of us and I can see him measuring the odds at last. Whatever he finds there strips the last of the bravado from him.

He spits in the dirt, then backs away.

Patrick catches his horse’s reins in silence. Ewan climbs to the wagon seat with less swagger than when he leapt from it. He reaches out toward Aileen, perhaps by habit, perhaps by the right he still thinks he possesses.

Alex moves to the dagger at his back again.

Ewan lets his hand fall.