Brennach and three men reached it from the other side and threw their weight against the gate.
“Hold!” Aingeal shouted from above.
Women with poles. Boys with stones. Old men dragging beams. Étaín with a bloodied kitchen knife in one hand and a child clutched against her side, screaming at anyone who tried to panic near her. Father Cillian hauling a wounded man clear with his priest’s robe dark with rain and blood.
Aingeal saw it all with a clarity so sharp it became almost terrible.
This was her castle. Not the council’s scheme. Not the alliance. Not the false name or the broken one.
Hers.
And she would not let it fall. “Archers to the right!” she cried. “Now!”
The volley went down ragged but enough. Mael Ruadh’s men flinched back from the gate. Seamus seized the moment from outside and drove his cut-off riders hard into their flank. Brennach pushed the inner brace into place. Reginald, at the gate mouth, fought not like a man hungry for death, but like a man determined that no one else would be spent in his place.
And then Mael Ruadh came out of the hall bleeding from one temple, one arm hanging badly, but he still had a blade in his right hand and murder clear in his face. He saw Aingeal on the wall. Saw the narrow stair. Saw that the men below were too occupied to stop him.
Reginald glimpsed him a breath later. Too late to reach him first.
Mael Ruadh came up the stair.
Aingeal did not retreat.
He reached the top with his sword raised and a snarl torn open in his face. “You should have taken my offer.”
Aingeal held the spear across her body. “You should have made a better one.”
He struck, connecting with the thick spear.
The force of it drove her back against the parapet. Pain shot through her shoulder. She held the spear above her for protection, barely.
He struck again, and this time the spear shaft cracked. Aingeal staggered. The wall edge opened behind her, wet stone and empty air.
Then Reginald reached the walkway.
Mael Ruadh turned just enough.
Aingeal saw the opening. She did not think of Máire. Did not think of the hill, or the shove, or the girl she feared still lived somewhere beneath her skin.
She chose.
She drove the broken spear into Mael Ruadh’s wounded arm with all the force she had left.
He cried out and spun toward her.
Reginald came up behind him and stopped with his sword at the man’s throat. For one breath, death stood waiting.
The hall below had gone dim in Aingeal’s hearing. The battle sounds thinned. All she saw was Reginald’s face. The old, terrible capacity in him. The perfect line where one movement would end a man.
Mael Ruadh laughed, breathless and bloody. “Do it, FitzUrse. Show them the cathedral lives in you still.”
Reginald’s hand tightened around the sword’s handle.
Aingeal held her breath.
Then Reginald lowered the blade a fraction and struck Mael Ruadh across the temple with the hilt.
The man dropped hard onto the wet stone, unconscious but alive.
