“But we’ve done it all already. In every position, in all the secret places of the manor. With you pressed to the wall of an alley, your skirt hiked up, my fingers in your mouth. I’m bored of it. Aren’t you?”

Those words would have been galling enough had they been spoken in private, but spoken here, amid their guests, and loud enough that they rang over the music, they seemed unspeakably cruel. Ursilla blanched at them, the colour fled from her face.

“Why would you say such things?”

He shrugged. “Because they are true.”

A miserable silence took Ursilla in its teeth. She drew away from her husband, aghast. Too late she realised what she had done. She was married to him now, sworn to him. There would be no recourse now. Another woman might have thought to divorce him, or the use of a sharp knife as he slept, or poison in his tea, or contracting a man to do what she could not. Unfortunately, Ursilla had promised she would not leave him and that she would see no harm done to him. There’d been rumours that the Balfour blood carried a gleam of the fae and never had that scrap of gossip rung truer. Despite everything, despite her heart laying shattered on the grass, Ursilla could not even put thought into the notion of breaking her word.

“You’re a bastard,” she told him grimly.

“Be that as it may,” said Duncan. “I am also your husband.”

His laughter chased her as she stormed away from the wedding party. To the dark, towards the shore, into the sea where something as old as love waited.

“A Balfour comes,” said a man’s deep voice when Ursilla was ankle-deep in the frigid waters. “I haven’t seen one of yours in six hundred years.”

“Who are you?” demanded Ursilla, tensing, hand darting to the knife she wore at her hip.

“Who are you?” echoed the man, teasingly.

Ursilla straightened, expression imperious. “I am Ursilla Balfour, laird of Stronsay, and I will not be frightened by a stranger.”

“But you will be insulted by your husband?”

She scowled. “My will had nothing to do with that. If it did, he would have said nothing.”

The man, still unseen, his voice seeming to come from everywhere and nowhere, laughed, and Ursilla found she liked how the coppery sound echoed along the beach. In her mind’s eye, she built an image of her companion: a man as tall as her father but broader still along the shoulders, with a powerful chest, a generous stomach, a smile that lit his face like a star.

“You remind me of your grandmother.”

“You know of her?” said Ursilla.

“Knew of her? I knew her.” said the man. “We were friends, for a time. Before she decided it was inappropriate for a married woman to be seen with a thing like me.”

Ursilla could hear the man’s grin.