Read Chapter 21: The Exile's Path

The rain began as a whisper, a fine mist that clung to Iona’s hair and face, and by the time she saw the low stone wall of the MacTavish boundary, it had become a steady, drumming downpour. Her mare, Bess, was lathered and weary, but Iona pushed her on, past the grazing sheep who huddled with their backs to the weather, past the empty shepherd’s bothy that had stood abandoned for a fortnight, and up the muddy track to the main house.

The door was opened by a housemaid whose face went pale at the sight of her.

“Miss Iona—we thought you were at Braemore.”

“I was,” Iona said, stripping off her soaked plaid and letting it drop to the floor in a sodden heap. Her hands were shaking, though whether from the cold or from Lachlan’s face as he had turned away from her, she could not say. “Where is my father?”

The maid hesitated. “In his study, miss. He has been… troubled since the letter came.”

Iona pushed past her and walked the familiar corridor with a tread that was too loud, too fast. She did not knock. She threw open the door to the study and found Alistair MacTavish seated before the fire, a glass of whisky in his hand and a letter open on the desk before him.

He looked up slowly, and his eyes, which had once been kind, were now flat and cold.

“You’ve a Campbell stink about you,” he said. “I ordered the gates closed to you.”

The words hit her like a slap. Iona felt her breath catch, but she forced her chin up. “I am your daughter.”

“You are a Campbell now,” he said, his voice carrying the weight of a verdict. “You stood in their hall and swore an oath before God. Whatever I did to keep this family safe, you have undone by handing yourself to the enemy.”

“The enemy?” Iona laughed—a sharp, brittle sound. “Father, I have read your confession. I know what you and MacAllister did. I know about the raid. I know you have been lying to me all my life.”

Alistair’s face did not change, but his hand tightened around the glass. “Then you know I did it for you. For this land. You would not understand the choices that were forced upon me.”

“Try me,” she said. “I am no longer a child.”

He rose then, setting the glass down with a heavy thud. “You are a woman who married a Campbell and then came home without her husband. That makes you a whore or a fool, and I will not have either under my roof.”

Iona opened her mouth to speak, but he had already turned his back to her. She saw his shoulders rise and fall once—a breath, a dismissal.

“Go,” he said. “Find shelter elsewhere. You are not welcome at Glenfinnen until you renounce that marriage and all it stands for.”

Iona stood in the doorway, the fire crackling between them, and felt something inside her crack too. She had expected anger. She had expected to fight. But she had not expected to be cast off so easily—discarded like a piece of furniture no longer useful.

She turned and walked out into the rain.

The road away from the house was dark and empty. Iona walked until the lights of the manor faded behind her, until the rain soaked through to her bones, until her feet began to stumble over the uneven ground. She thought of the confession, now in Callum’s hands. She thought of Lachlan’s face, twisted with betrayal. She thought of her father, who had sat by the fire while she was thrown out into the storm.

She had no letter. No proof. No husband. No home.

She was walking nowhere, with nothing, when she saw the light.

It came from a small bothy set back from the road, hidden by a copse of wind-bent birches. A wisp of smoke rose from its chimney. Iona stopped, heart hammering. It was Tam’s bothy—the shepherd who had gone missing weeks ago, whose letter had sealed her fate.

The door creaked open before she could decide whether to run.

“Get inside,” Tam said. His voice was hoarse and low, but his eyes were sharp in the lamplight. “You’ll catch your death.”

Iona hesitated. Then the cold won, and she ducked under the low lintel into the warmth.

The bothy was small and cluttered—a bed, a table, a fire over which hung a pot of something that smelled of turnips and barley. Tam gestured for her to sit, and she did, her body finally surrendering to the shivers that wracked her frame.

He wrapped a rough wool blanket around her shoulders and pressed a worn cup of broth into her hands. She drank, the heat searing her throat.

“You were at Braemore,” Tam said. It was not a question.

“I was thrown out.”

“By the Campbell?”

“By both,” she said. “Lachlan believes I conspired with my father. My father believes I have betrayed him by marrying a Campbell. The only one who knows the truth is dead, and the proof of it is in the hands of a man who would rather burn it than see it used.”

Tam was silent for a long moment. He stoked the fire, then sat across from her, his weathered face lit by the dancing flames.

“I wrote that letter,” he said.

Iona set down the cup. “I know. Gregor—the man who claims to be Gregor—he brought it to Callum. Why did you do it? Why did you lie about me?”

Tam shook his head slowly. “I did not lie. Not about the part that mattered. You were meeting with your father, Iona. You were planning something against the Campbells. I did not know it was to expose him—I only knew that the MacTavish daughter had gone to her father’s side with a purpose. I feared you were part of the plan.”

“What plan?”

Tam’s jaw tightened. He looked toward the fire, and for a moment his eyes went distant and raw.

“Your mother knew,” he said. “She knew about the deed. She knew about MacAllister’s scheme to take the lands. She came to me—the night before she died—and she told me everything.”

Iona felt her heart stop. “My mother was ill. She died of fever.”

“She died because she knew too much,” Tam said. His voice cracked. “Donal’s men came to the house that night. The merchant’s men. They did not come to rob. They came to silence her. I was there, in the shadows, and I saw them go in. She never saw the morning.”

Iona’s hands were shaking, and not from the cold. “Why did you not speak?”

“Who would I tell?” Tam said, sorrow bitter in his voice. “Your father was in league with them. The Campbells would not hear a MacTavish man. I was a shepherd—no one listened to me. I only wrote that letter because I feared you would drag the girl I watched grow up into the same fire that killed her mother.”

Iona stared at him, at the grief etched into his face, at the truth she could feel in her bones. The story she had been told—the fever, the quiet passing—had been a lie. Her mother had been killed. Killed to keep the secret of the deed, of the fraud, of the plot that had torn two families apart for decades.

“Donal,” she whispered. “Not MacAllister. Donal.”

Tam nodded. “MacAllister is the face. Donal is the hand. He has been buying land, selling debts, moving pieces on a board that no one else can see. He killed your mother to keep her from moving against him. And he will kill you too, if you stay where he can find you.”

Iona looked down at her hands. They were red with cold, and empty. She had come to Glenfinnen for shelter, and she had found instead the shape of her enemy.

Donal.

The merchant who held the deed. The merchant whose claim would have been defeated by her marriage—and who had moved to destroy her mother when she threatened it.

She stood, letting the blanket fall from her shoulders. “I can’t stay here. He will look for me.”

Tam rose slowly, his eyes steady. “Then where will you go?”

Iona thought of Lachlan’s face. She thought of her father’s back. She thought of the cave, and the deed, and the brooch that had once belonged to her mother—a brooch that had been given to a Campbell, long before the feud.

“I will go where the truth can be used,” she said. “I do not have the confession, but I have what you have told me. I have what the cave showed me. And I have a name now—the true name.”

She met Tam’s gaze.

“Will you help me?”

Tam looked at her for a long moment. Then he knelt and began to gather a pack with the efficiency of a man who had spent his life moving across the hills.

“I have been waiting for someone to ask that for fifteen years,” he said.