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aking the following morning from a dream in which she had been riding from Annan House to Dunwythie Mains in the company of
     Robert Maxwell, rather than with her parents and Fiona, Mairi eyed with a sense of unreality the sun streaming through the
     window of the bedchamber she shared with Fiona.
    The rain had stopped.
    Her sister still slept, so Mairi crept out of bed without disturbing her while silently scolding herself for allowing Robert
     Maxwell to invade her dreams.
    As she poured water from the ewer on the washstand into the basin to wash her face and hands, she continued to wonder at such
     a foolish dream. He was not even the sort of man she had hoped one day to meet, let alone to marry.
    Someone, doubtless the same maidservant who had come in quietly, and as quietly had opened the shutters and filled the ewer
     with fresh water, had set out clothing for Mairi and Fiona to wear that day. The pink-and-green embroidered gray kirtle she
     had put out for Mairi laced up the back. So, after slipping on her soft cambric shift and tying its white silk ribbons at
     her cleavage, Mairi opened the door and peeked around it to the landing.
    No one was there. But hearing footsteps above, she waited. And presently the plump, rosy lass who served them came into view
     round the turn.
    “Flory, I need help lacing my kirtle,” Mairi said quietly.
    “Aye, m’lady, I were just a-coming. Be the lady Fiona up yet?”
    “Nay, but I doubt we will wake her.”
    “That lassie does sleep as if she were deaf,” Flory said, straightening her cap. “Will I brush your hair first, m’lady?”
    “Nay, I’ll dress first. The air is gey chilly in here.”
    While she concentrated on dressing and not waking Fiona, who would sleep soundly for only so long, Mairi did not think of
     Maxwell. But as she made her way downstairs to the hall to break her fast, she wondered if he might still be angry.
    That he had been fuming just before he’d taken leave of them would have been plain to the meanest intelligence. She was sorry
     for that, although her father had been the one to anger him. Even Dunwythie had admitted that a sheriff generally did command
     a whole shire. Still, the Maxwells were overstepping tradition. That, too, was clear.
    Never in Annandale’s history had its nobles paid their share of the Crown’s demands to anyone save their own steward or seneschal
     to deliver to the King. That the sheriff hoped to change that tradition was one thing. That he had the right or the power
     to do so without Annandale’s consent was another question.
    Still, she could wish that Robert Maxwell had come into her life in some other way—and as some person other than a Maxwell.
    Chuckling at her own whimsy, she thrust all thought of him from her mind at the hall landing and stepped onto the dais with
     a smile for her father and another for her stepmother. The latter had come down earlier than usual.
    “I trust you slept well, madam,” Mairi said.
    “Och, aye, as well as I ever do these days, I expect,” Phaeline said.
    Dunwythie was halfway through his breakfast, his attention clearly on other matters. But after Mairi had taken a manchet from
     the basket and allowed a gillie to serve her ale from the flagon, and a small fried trout doubtless caught fresh from the
     river that morning, she said to her father, “Sir, do you think the Sheriff of Dumfries can just force his authority on Annandale?”
    Giving her a fond look, Dunwythie said, “Ye women! I tell ye, ye needna fret about such things.”
    “Mayhap we need not, sir,” Mairi said. “But one dislikes seeing anyone leave here in anger, as Robert Maxwell did yestereve.
     And he did say the sheriff has power to seize our estates.
Can
he, sir?”
    “Nay, nay, lass. Dinna be thinking such things. It willna happen. I mean to make it plain that I’ll have nae bowing down to
     the Maxwells. They just want to exert such power to raise more gelt for their own purpose. I ken fine what it