Frederick inclined his head.
Around them, servants moved to take horses and baggage, doors opening wide to admit them into the keep. It looked, for all the world, like the beginning of an ordinary visit between neighboring houses.
Nothing about it felt ordinary at all.
Frederick closed the chamber door behind them, and for a brief moment neither of them spoke.
The room was comfortable in the way all noble guest chambers seemed meant to be. A fire had already been laid and lit. Their trunks had been brought up and set neatly by the wall. Fresh water stood ready in a basin near the screen, and heavy curtains had been drawn partway across the narrow windows against the coming dark. It should have felt welcoming.
Instead, Iona stood just inside the room with her gloves still on, her back too straight, her heart too restless.
Frederick noticed at once.
Of course he did.
He turned to face her fully, one hand still resting on the latch, his expression quiet, wary almost, as though he knew she had not asked him here merely to stand in silence.
“Iona?”
She took a breath and forced herself not to look away.
“I do nae want to go into supper carrying this between us,” she said.
Something in his face shifted at once. Not alarm. Something more sober than that.
“Aye,” he said. “Then speak it.”
That, more than anything, made it easier.
Iona moved farther into the room, pulling off one glove finger by finger, only to give her hands something to do. “I was hurt,” she said plainly. “Nae only because ye shouted. Though I did nae care for that either.”
Frederick’s mouth tightened slightly, but he did not interrupt.
“It was the way ye spoke to me,” she continued. “The way ye made it sound as though I was something to be commanded. Something to be overruled because ye are me husband and that should be enough.”
He let out a slow breath through his nose.
“I ken,” he said.
She looked up sharply. “Do ye?”
“Aye.” He crossed the room then, though not so quickly that it felt like pressure. Only enough that she did not feel as though she were speaking across a field. “I kent it the moment the words left me mouth. I only did nae know how badly they had landed until I saw yer face.”
Iona swallowed, the memory of it still uncomfortably fresh. “It made me feel foolish. Foolish for thinking we were… more equal than that.”
His gaze sharpened slightly. “We are.”
“But ye see, that is nae how it felt.”
“I ken,” he said quietly. “And that was me failing, nae yers.”
The answer disarmed her more than any defense might have. She had prepared herself, at least a little, for argument. For stubbornness. For another slow circling of the same wound. Instead, he stood before her and took the blame of it without trying to lessen what he had done.
Iona looked down at the glove in her hand. “I did nae wish to punish ye with silence.”
His brow lifted faintly. “Well, ye did a fair job of it all the same.”
A breath of laughter escaped her before she could stop it, small and unwilling but real. It eased something between them at once.