Once she had made him promise to go. Now she was the one undoing exile with her own words.
Reginald closed his eyes briefly. He had thought himself too stained to ask for life. Too much the sum of dead men’s names, dead saints’ blood, and selfish hungers dressed in duty for years. Perhaps he was all those things still.
And yet here she stood. Not forgiving blindly. Only fierce enough to choose him in the truth.
When he opened his eyes again, there was nothing left in him that resembled entitlement. Only awe. Only gratitude so fierce it almost felt like grief. “If I stay,” he said, “I stay as the man you know now. Nothing hidden. Nothing borrowed.”
“Yes.”
“And if there are days you hate me for what I have been…”
“There will be,” she said.
The bluntness of it almost undid him. “And you will still have me?” The surprise in his own voice shamed him, but he could not hide it.
Aingeal’s gaze softened then, not into innocence, but into something stronger. “I will have you as you are,” she said. “Or not at all.”
He bent his head once in acceptance of something too large to meet any other way. “Then I will stay.”
Aingeal let out a breath she had been holding too long. For one moment, she only looked at him, as if memorizing the exact shape of what had just been chosen. Then she reached for him.
Her hand came to his face, and when he covered it with his own, it felt like the first honest touch between them.
Not absolution. Not the end of consequence.
The beginning of something chosen with open eyes.
Chapter thirty-three
Two days later
Aingeal entered the Great Hall, Reginald following, to find Ciarán, the steward of Rathmore, sitting at a wooden table with his hands wrapped around a cup he had not touched. Road dust still clung to the hem of his cloak despite the rain. His face bore the stunned pallor of a man who had come north carrying one grief and found another waiting beneath a false name.
As she approached, Ciarán set the cup aside and rose.
“My lady,” he said, and bowed. “I ask leave to take my lord home.”
The hall quieted around them.
Reginald stood two paces behind Aingeal, no longer guarded as he had been, but not free of attention. Seamus stood near the pillar with both arms folded and a face that told every man present he would rather chew iron than trust easily. Tomas had his wax tablet ready. Brennach waited in grim silence. Father Cillian stood near the chapel passage, watching with the grave expression of a man who understood that burial could be as political as battle. Around them, servants slowed their duties to listen.
Aingeal looked at Ciarán. “You mean Donal’s body.”
“Aye.” His voice roughened. “He should not lie beneath foreign earth while the man who took his name stands in the hall he meant to enter.”
Aingeal felt Reginald go still behind her, not the old stillness, not the guarded silence of Donal O’Raida. This was the stillness of a man accepting the full weight of what he had done.
“You are right,” Aingeal said.
Ciarán’s gaze shifted to her, surprised by the quickness of her answer.
She turned to Reginald. “Can you find the grave?”
“Yes.” His voice was low. “I know the place.”
“Then you will take us there.”
Seamus straightened at once. “My lady…”
