Chapter 27
Morning had barely settled over the keep when Archer O’Douglas was shown into Frederick’s study for the second time in as many days. This time, there was no wine set out, no pretense of courtesy lingering for its own sake, and no softness to the air in the room.
Lennox stood near the hearth with his arms folded.
Iona sat rigid in the chair nearest Frederick’s desk, her face composed in a way that told him she had not slept nearly enough.
Frederick remained standing behind the desk, one hand braced against its edge, as though motion alone might keep him from saying too much too soon.
Archer looked from one face to the next and said, “Tell me all of it.”
Frederick did. He did not dress any of it in gentler words than necessary. He told Archer what Iona had revealed the night before. Her place in MacFarlane Castle. The women hidden below. Noor’s knowledge of it. The escape. The years of pursuit that had followed.
As he spoke, his gaze returned again and again to Iona, not because he doubted his own telling, but because he could still feel the weight of her voice from the night before, the rawness of it, and the fury it had left in him.
Archer listened without interruption, though the stillness in him sharpened with every detail. By the time Frederick finished, the man had gone entirely cold about the eyes.
“Aye,” Archer said at last. “That sounds like her.”
Frederick’s brow furrowed. “Ye daenae sound surprised.”
“I am nae surprised by cruelty,” Archer replied. “Only by the lengths some people go to dress it as virtue.”
He began to pace then, not with nervous energy, but with the focused motion of a man fitting moving pieces together in his head.
“We cannae accuse Lady Noor openly without proof strong enough to hold the room,” he said.
“Nae if we mean to avoid setting half the Highlands on fire. MacFarlane may be diminished, but wounded pride still gathers swords quickly enough. If we move badly, her son will be forced to choose blood over sense, whether he likes it or not.”
Lennox grunted. “And if we move well?”
Archer glanced toward him. “Then we reveal what she is while giving him room to cut her loose without taking the insult as his own.”
Frederick’s mouth flattened. “That is a narrow road.”
“Aye,” Archer said. “But a passable one.”
He stopped pacing and looked at Frederick directly. “Ye, me, and a small number of men leave tomorrow for O’Douglas Castle.”
Iona lifted her head. “Tomorrow?”
Archer nodded. “Me household has already seen enough odd movement these past weeks that another guarded arrival will draw less notice than elsewhere. We bring the right men, say little, and wait for her to reveal where impatience has made her careless.”
Frederick saw the change in Iona before she spoke. It was slight at first. A tightening through the shoulders.
“Nay,” she said.
Both men looked at her.
Iona rose from her chair. “This willnae end unless I end it.”
Frederick felt the warning before the words were fully out of her mouth.
“I will come with ye,” she said. “If she thinks she can finally lay hands on me, she will make a mistake.”
“Nay,” Frederick said at once.
She turned toward him fully, her eyes bright now not with panic, but with resolve so sharp it nearly unsettled him. “She has hunted me for seven years. Seven. If word reaches her that I am within reach, she willnae sit quietly and wait for wiser heads to advise restraint.”
“I said nay.”
Archer, curse him, did not interrupt. He only watched.
Iona stepped closer to the desk. “If I am there, she will move. If she moves, she will expose herself. Ye both know that.”
Frederick pushed away from the desk and came around it, his voice low and controlled in a way that took effort now. “And ye think I would willingly put ye in her path after all she has done.”
“I think ye may have nay choice if ye truly mean to stop her.”
His jaw tightened. “There is always a choice.”
“Nae one that ends this.”
The room went quiet.
Frederick looked at Archer then, expecting, absurdly perhaps, that the man would see reason enough to support him.
Archer only folded his hands behind his back and said, “Whether I like the shape of it or not, she is right about one thing. We have a duty to the women already taken. And to those not yet taken.”
Frederick turned on him. “I did nae ask for your judgment on me wife.”
“Nay,” Archer said calmly. “But ye shall have it all the same. If she is the thread that draws Noor out, it is worth considering.”
“It is not.”
Iona’s breath hitched slightly at the force in his voice, but she did not retreat.
“She is nae bait,” Frederick said. “She is under my protection.”
“And those other women were under ours,” Archer answered. “Or should have been.”
The words landed harder than Frederick liked. Harder because they were not wrong.
Still, wrong or no, he would not have it.
“We leave tomorrow,” Archer continued. “We plan without her for now, but we daenae ignore what may be necessary.”
Frederick stared at him. “There is nay need for now. She doesnae come.”
Archer lifted one shoulder. “Then settle that between yerselves. I care only that by tomorrow morning I know whether I travel with a useful plan or a husband too distracted to keep his head.”
That earned him a dark look from Lennox and a colder one from Frederick, but Archer seemed not to mind either.
When he finally left, the study felt smaller than before.
Lennox, with more wisdom than Frederick was inclined to credit in the moment, followed soon after under the excuse of checking the guard roster. The door closed behind him, and the quiet that remained between Frederick and Iona was worse than the argument that had preceded it.
“Ye are wrong.”
He let out a slow breath through his nose. “Iona.”
“Nay. Daenae ‘Iona’ me as though that settles anything.” She stood by the chair still, hands tight at her sides, her whole body held together by will alone. “This concerns me. It has always concerned me. I am done hiding from it while men decide what is best.”
Frederick crossed the room toward her and stopped close enough to force her to look up if she meant to keep challenging him. “What is best is keeping ye far from her.”
“What is best for whom?”
“For ye.”
“And if that isnae what I choose?”
His temper, which had been held by little more than force since morning, slipped.
“Then ye will listen to yer husband.” The words came out harder than he intended. Not louder. Harder. Heavy with command rather than care.
Iona stared at him. Whatever answer she had been prepared to give vanished from her face at once. The change in her expression was small, but he saw it. The hurt. The withdrawal. The way something bright and open in her closed with quiet finality.
“I see,” she said.
Frederick exhaled, already regretting the shape of what he had said, though not the substance. “Iona, I meant—”
“Nay,” she said softly. “Ye meant exactly what ye said.”
She stepped back before he could reach for her. For one terrible moment, he thought she might shout. Rage. Strike back at him in the same sharp way she had done a hundred times before when cornered. Instead, she only looked tired. And that, for reasons he could not fully name, felt worse.
“This is duty for ye,” she said, her voice very even now. “Keeping me safe. Deciding for me. Protecting what is yers.”
His chest tightened. “It is more than that.”
Her smile did not reach her eyes. “Is it?”
He tried to answer. Nothing he could say arrived in time.
Iona lowered her gaze only once, then lifted it again with an expression he had never wished to see directed at him.
“I was foolish,” she murmured. “I forgot myself.”
Then she turned and left him standing in the middle of the room, with all the force of his certainty still around him and no sense, suddenly, that any of it had been enough.
Frederick remained in the study long after the door had closed behind Iona.
The room had gone quiet in the sort of way that made every small sound seem louder than it was. The fire shifted once in the hearth. A coal settled. Somewhere beyond the walls, footsteps passed in the corridor and faded again. None of it touched the knot that had formed low in his chest.
By all sensible reckoning, Archer had been right.
That was the part Frederick disliked most.
There was a path before them, narrow and unclean, but a path all the same.
If Noor Burnett had spent years hunting Iona, then Iona’s presence might indeed force her hand.
It might draw her into the open in a way that patrols, warnings, and careful questioning had failed to do.
It might save others. Women already taken.
Women not yet taken. The missing bairns whose names now sat in men’s mouths and mothers’ prayers.
He had a duty to them.
He had always had a duty to his people.
So why, when the logic of it stood plain before him, did every part of him resist it as though it were madness?
He knew the answer well enough, though he did not like the shape of it.
Because it was Iona.
And the thought of putting her where Noor might see her, reach for her, claim her, made something hard and immediate rise in him that had very little to do with reason and far too much to do with possession, fear, and a fury he could not entirely name.
All of the cold calculations he had made in other matters turned useless the moment they placed her at the center of the risk. He wanted her far from all of it.
He let out a slow breath and braced both hands against the desk, staring down at the papers spread there without seeing any of them.
It changes nothi’g.