Canterbury rose whole inside him. Not prayers. Not incense. Not the grand holiness men had wrapped around the memory afterward. What returned was stone and sound. Columns like pale trunks. Boots striking sacred floor.
Where is Thomas Becket?
His own voice. Sharp. Unafraid.
He remembered white robes. Torchlight over drawn steel. Becket standing as though no force on earth could bend him. He remembered the first clash of metal. Then the rest: the shock of steel meeting flesh, the jolt up his arm, the terrible knowledge that once a blade landed there was no clean path back from the deed.
He had not struck first. He still clung to that. But hehadstruck.
The floor had taken blood. Red blooming over gray stone, too bright, too vivid, as if the world itself had opened.
At the time, he had believed it necessary. The realm could not fracture around a miter. The king’s peace had to mean something. He had obeyed. He had acted where hesitation would have been weakness.
He lifted his eyes to the painted Christ above the altar.
The candle flames trembled.
He had taken Donal O’Raida’s name not from fear, he told himself, but from calculation. The Church had condemned him. The court had whispered. He had done penance he had not meant. Stories traveled faster than horses. A dead man’s name had offered cover.
He had not thought beyond that.
A bitter laugh broke from him. He had spilled blood on sacred ground, and now he was meant to kneel for vows.
He crossed to the altar and set both hands on the white linen cloth. The purity of it struck him almost violently.
Blood had spread over white once.
The image came back so sharply his throat closed. The first hot arc of red. The way it feathered outward into branching lines. The wet finality of blows landing. Afterward, silence. Not horror. Not weeping. Silence so complete it had seemed the world itself had recoiled.
And in that silence he had felt no remorse. Only justification. The task had been done.
He opened his eyes.
Ireland, not Canterbury. Tonight, not then. Yet Canterbury lived in him still, iron at the back of his tongue.
He could sit at a head table and accept toasts. He could carry a dead man’s name. He could build an entire life atop expectation and deceit. Underneath it, he would still be Reginald FitzUrse, the knight who had killed Archbishop Becket.
He stared at his reflection in a polished brass candleholder. Strong jaw. Controlled eyes. Hands disciplined by years of war. There was nothing monstrous in the face that stared back. That was perhaps the cruelest thing. He looked like the sort of man people trusted to guard a gate.
He thought of Aingeal.
She did not know what stained him. She did not know that when he looked at an altar, he saw blood. She did not know the lie he was.
He could leave. Heshouldleave. Before vows. Before she bound herself to rot she could not yet see.
But even as the thought formed, another rose beneath it, quieter and more dangerous.
What if here -- with duty, land, and her clear gaze -- something new could still be built?
Hope whispered like a treacherous friend.
The chapel door opened.
Reginald turned too quickly.
Aingeal stood just inside the threshold, firelight from the corridor outlining her. She had left the feast behind, but some of its brightness clung to her still: blue gown, silver at her throat, copper-red hair coiled with care. Her eyes were not bright. They were searching. “I thought I would find you praying,” she said.
His voice came rough. “Why would you think that?”
