Frederick did not think. He only acted.
The blade went in clean.
Noor’s laughter stopped all at once. Her body jerked once against his grip, her eyes widening not with pain at first, but with astonishment. As though death itself had broken some private rule she had always believed would protect her. Blood spilled hot over Frederick’s hand. Her mouth parted. Closed. Parted again.
Then the light went out of her eyes.
He let her fall.
For one moment, no one spoke.
Then Archer looked down at the body of his mother-in-law and said, with a composure that would have seemed absurd anywhere else, “Well. That is one way to handle a family difficulty.”
Frederick barely heard him.
He turned at once.
Iona was no longer looking at Noor. She had already dropped the candlestick and moved toward the women, kneeling beside the nearest one as Archer’s men cut the last of the bindings from her wrists. The woman was shaking too hard to rise. One of the children had begun sobbing in earnest now, the sound small and broken after so much forced silence.
“Ye are safe now,” Iona was saying, though her own voice shook with strain. “It is done. Do ye hear me? It is done.”
The red-haired woman from years ago stared at her and began to cry. “I kent ye,” she whispered. “I kent ye would come.”
Another woman, the one missing from Frederick’s own lands, clutched her child so tightly the bairn whimpered. “Thank ye,” she said hoarsely to no one and everyone at once. “God, thank ye.”
Frederick crossed the room in three strides and dropped to one knee beside Iona.
Her sleeve was soaked through.
He touched her arm first, then her shoulder, then her face, checking without grace and without apology. “Where else?”
She looked at him as though from very far away. “I am all right.”
“That is nae an answer.”
She tried to smile. It made his stomach drop. “I hurt her.”
“Aye,” he said. “Ye did.”
Her eyes fluttered once, the effort of keeping them focused suddenly visible. “I feel… lightheaded.”
The words had barely left her when her body tipped toward him. Frederick caught her before she struck the floor. “Iona.”
Lennox was suddenly there at his side, breathing hard, one sleeve bloodied to the elbow though not, Frederick thought, from any wound of his own. “She is breathing.”
“I ken she is breathing.”
“Aye, and she has also just walked herself into a trap, fought for her life, and watched a woman die. Give her a moment, for the love of God.”
Frederick ignored him except for the small fraction of reason in the words that forced his hands to steady.
Archer bent, gripped Noor’s body beneath the arms, and dragged it clear of the center of the room as though clearing away one more piece of wreckage. “We return at once,” he said. “I will take her back to the castle and let the morning sort the politics of it. Ye take your wife home, Laird McIntosh.”
Home.
The word struck with sudden urgency.
Lennox nodded toward the woman from Frederick’s lands. “I will stay behind with her and one of Archer’s men until she can be moved properly.”