“Good.”
She touched Bríd with her heels, and the mare moved forward. A moment later, he mounted the second horse with the same easy efficiency he used with his sword and brought the animal alongside hers.
They rode out beneath a pale, thin sky.
The castle fell behind them, its towers sinking into the folds of the hills. Wind tugged at Aingeal’s cloak. Crows burst from the hedgerows as they passed, then settled again in their wake.
She slowed just enough for him to come up beside her.
Questions gathered between them, heavier than the weather.
Villagers greeted her on the road with lifted hands, bows, and quiet smiles. A baker pressed a still-warm loaf into her fingers. A laughing child snatched at her sleeve and darted away before his mother could scold him. Aingeal answered each greeting with practiced warmth. These faces were known to her. Their needs, their worries, their small daily burdens belonged to her more surely than any crown ever could.
Beside her, the English knight saw everything. Not in an admiring way but in a harder way, a tighter one. He marked the man lingering too long beside a cart. The branch hanging low across the road. The dark angle beside an unlatched door. His posture never quite eased. He rode as though danger might rise from any bend and expected to meet it head-on.
In the village, they dismounted and moved among the market stalls.
Aingeal listened to complaints and petitions with the same patience she gave disputes over grazing rights and stores. One woman fretted over a shifted boundary stone. A cooper asked relief from a levy. A boy insisted his master docked wages unfairly. Small matters, perhaps. But small things grew teeth when left untended.
The knight remained one pace behind her shoulder. Quiet, watchful and ready.
An elderly woman passed them with her arms wrapped tight around herself, shivering beneath a threadbare shawl. Without a word, the English knight unclasped his cloak and settled it over her shoulders. No flourish. No smile. No glance about to see who had noticed.
The old woman’s face softened at once. Gratitude lit her eyes. When she thanked him, he looked almost uncomfortable.
That made Aingeal like him more than she meant to.
On the ride back, the sky lowered. Gray thickened overhead until the road ran before them like a dark ribbon through the fields. She had spent the morning shaping questions and discarding them again. At last, she said, lightly, “You need not ride so close.”
He glanced toward her. “It is my duty.”
She turned her horse slightly toward his. “You challenged me on the road.”
“I did.”
“Most men would have yielded.”
His expression did not shift. “I do not yield easily.”
That nearly drew a smile from her. “I saw you practicing this morning,” she said. “You fight well.”
He gave a brief nod. “Thank you.”
“You learned on battlefields.”
“Yes.”
“Not in tournaments.”
“No.” There was no pride in it. No swagger. Only fact.
She had known as much already from the way he moved, but hearing it aloud confirmed something colder beneath her curiosity. He belonged to a harder world than courts and polished halls. Orders, war, and long loyalties.
“You still have not told me your name,” she said. The pause was brief. Brief enough to miss, if she had not already been listening for what men hid.
“Sir Donal O’Raida.”
For one heartbeat, the horizon seemed to tilt.
