Behind me.The thought steadied her. Frederick, Archer, Lennox, the men. Near enough to matter. Far enough to keep the illusion intact. She did not look back. Noor would expect fear. Noor would expect hesitation. She would not be given either, not if Iona could help it.
The door opened before she reached for it.
A man stood there, broad through the shoulders, his face roughened by weather and hard use. She did not know him, but she knew the type of him at once. Bought loyalty. Violent enough to be useful. Not intelligent enough to ask what sort of work made him necessary.
He looked her over, then stepped aside.
Inside, the air struck her first. It was stale. There were too many bodies shut too long in one place. Beneath it, the sharp smell of fear and dirty straw and something medicinal gone sour with misuse. Iona crossed the threshold and felt the door close behind her with a heaviness that should have unnerved her more than it did.
She had expected that sound for years. Had heard it in dreams often enough that the real thing only sharpened her focus.
The main room of the lodge had been cleared of nearly everything that might have made it resemble a place built for leisure. A fire burned too low in the hearth to warm the space properly. A long table had been shoved aside. Chairs were scattered without order, as though no one here had recently needed to sit. Lanterns hung from hooks along the walls and threw uneven light across the floor, catching on faces and leaving other parts of the room in shadow.
Noor stood near the hearth.
She had not changed clothes since supper. She still looked every inch the gracious noblewoman, her gown dark and elegant, her posture composed, her hair adorned with the tiniest of gems. It was almost obscene, that polished calm in such a room.
But Noor was not alone.
For one brief, horrifying moment, Iona could not take in the whole of what she was seeing. Her gaze moved too quickly. A shape against the wall. Another near the overturned bench. Small bodies huddled low. Women pale beneath dirt and bruising. Children too quiet.
Three women.
Three bairns.
And behind each of them, standing with hands too near weapons or throats, a man.
The sight hit her like a blow.
Not merely the number of them. The arrangement. Not imprisonment alone. Display. Threat made visible. If any woman or child moved where they were not meant to, one of those men could end a life before help crossed the room.
Two of the women Iona recognized.
The first had been younger when she last saw her, little more than a girl then, dark-haired and feverish with terror in the lower cells of MacFarlane. Now she sat on the floor against the far wall, thinner, older, her face drawn sharp with hunger and exhaustion. Her eyes widened when they found Iona, not with hope, but with something closer to disbelief.
The second recognition came harder. A red-haired woman with a scar now tracing one cheek, one of the same women Iona had helped free seven years before. Iona remembered the sound of her crying in the dark. Remembered the way she had clutched another woman’s hand while climbing the stair from that hidden place. To see her here again, dragged back into the same nightmare by the same rot, turned Iona’s stomach so sharply she nearly faltered.
She did not.
The bairns were younger than Jamie.
That thought came and lodged in her chest like ice.
One little girl sat rigid in her mother’s lap, too frightened even to whimper, while a man stood over them with a knife at his belt and boredom on his face. Another child, a boy perhaps four years old, had his fingers in his mouth and his eyes fixed on Noor as though he already understood where the true danger lived. The third bairn was asleep or unconscious against the shoulder of the only woman Iona did not recognize, though the way the child’s limbs hung made her fear it was not simple sleep.
Noor watched all of this watch her.
“Well, well,” she said softly. “Ye did come.”
Iona took another step into the room, then another, enough that the lantern light reached her face fully. “Aye.”
Noor’s mouth curved. “I did wonder whether ye would lose your nerve and run to one of yer men after all.”
Iona let her gaze move once more over the hostages. Over the men behind them. Over the conditions in which they had been kept. There were blankets, but too few. Water, but not enough.
The old rage came quickly now. “Ye always did enjoy an audience, though,” Iona said. “But surely none of these womenshould be here, Noor, the bairns are far too young to have been born of yer husband.”
One of the guards shifted at that, glancing toward Noor as though uncertain whether insolence merited immediate correction.