“But until then,” he said, “no more public tests. No little cruelties. No spectacle.”
She searched his face as if expecting a snare. “And if I accept?”
“You will have my service and my departure. Public. Clean. Your honor untouched.”
“And if I keep you past the day you set?”
He looked at her for a long moment. “Then you will have me bound,” he said quietly. “By oath. By duty. And you will answer for keeping me.”
The intimacy of it surprised them both. A pact that sounded practical and felt perilously close to trust.
Aingeal lifted her hand.
Reginald looked at it, then took it.
Her palm was warm. Steady. The clasp felt like treaty and warning both, and something else more dangerous because it was gentler.
“I will leave before the wedding,” he vowed. “I will make this house safer first. Until then, we act as allies.”
Her fingers tightened once against his. “So sworn,” she said.
Chapter nine
Aingeal chose the solar because it had only one door. There was nowhere to hide in it. No shadows broad enough for either of them to slip through. She wanted the room to match the bargain they had made.
Donal stood near the hearth with his hands clasped behind his back. He did not pace. Did not fidget. He waited with that contained stillness of his, as though restraint were not virtue but habit, learned hard and long ago.
The sight tightened something low in her throat. She shut the door firmly and crossed to the narrow table.
Maps lay ready. Pins. Wax tablets. The steward’s notes on patrol rotations. Reports from the western farms.
She had not summoned him to speak of feelings. Feelings had already made too much disorder. “Here,” she said, sliding one finger along the marshy ford where the road narrowed through wet ground. “You lean in when I point to it. Not too close. The men need to see consultation, not comfort. But close enough that even a clerk in the back understands we speak with one mind.”
He came to the table without protest. Watched where she pointed. Took up the quill and marked a small cross where she indicated the patrol overlap. Ink and maps were clearly less natural to him than steel, yet he handled them with the same grave respect.
“If Brennach objects,” she continued, “you let me answer first. Then you support the answer with a fact he cannot argue away.”
Donal glanced up. “And if I simply tell him he is wrong?”
She shot him a look.
His mouth shifted.
“Do not be theatrical.”
“Understood.” His voice had gone mild again, but the faint trace of humor remained beneath it.
She disliked that she heard it. Disliked more that she wanted to hear it again.
They worked through the morning as if strategy could save them from everything else.
Council first. Battlements before noon. Supper at the dais. Two quiet coughs if one of them needed the other to intervene. She fed him the shape of public unity the way she would teach a green soldier to hold a shield -- not too high, not too low, firm enough to survive the first blow.
When they entered the council chamber later, Donal sat at her right, close enough that the room would read unity, far enough that no one could honestly call it tenderness.
A map of the lower fields lay between them. She leaned to indicate the ford where the road cut through marsh. He leaned too, shifting the parchment to show the higher ridge line.
Their shoulders brushed.
