Then Étaín laughed and set her fingers, thoughtless and brief, on his sleeve. It was nothing. Her cousin’s idle touch. A knight’s grave tolerance. A single breath of contact in a public yard.
But the world shifted under Aingeal’s feet. Memory came swift and merciless. Máire in spring light. The ridge wet beneath their boots. That fierce, helpless, humiliating ache.
I wanted to be chosen.
Aingeal gripped the stone until cold burned through her gloves. She had not known then how quickly humiliation could turn to anger, and anger to action. Now she did.
A slow dread opened beneath the jealousy. Not fear of Étaín. Not fear of Donal.
Fear of the girl she had once been.
The monster that prayer, confession, and years of discipline had not fully buried.
By supper, she wrapped herself in silence because silence was the only armor she trusted.
The hall was warm with firelight and too many bodies, too much laughter, too much life. Dogs slept beneath benches. Brennach and Tomas argued over grain. Ordinary life pressed in from all sides.
Aingeal sat with Étaín on one side and Donal on the other. Trapped. She ate almost nothing. Spoke only when necessary. Donal, after one searching glance, stopped trying to catch her eye and turned his attention outward with that grave usefulness of his.
Étaín asked Father Cillian some irreverent question about saints’ relics and whether they cured gout or merely enriched monasteries. Brennach grunted. Tomas looked scandalized and amused. Laughter moved down the table.
Then Étaín turned to Donal. “And what do soldiers call relics when priests are not listening?”
Donal answered, “Weight to carry if the chapel catches fire.”
Half the table laughed.
Étaín looked delighted. “At last. I had begun to suspect you had no wit at all.”
Donal’s mouth shifted. “I prefer to keep expectations manageable.”
Aingeal set down her cup too hard.
The sound cut through the nearest conversation.
Étaín looked over. “Aingeal?”
Donal turned too, and whatever had been near the corner of his mouth vanished. He looked tired, confused, and hurt.
“What?” she asked too sharply.
Étaín blinked. “Only that you nearly shattered the cup.”
“Then the cup should learn better balance.”
Silence followed. Not enough to stop the hall. Enough that those nearest looked elsewhere.
Donal said, low enough for only them to hear, “If I have done something…”
The care in the question split the day open, tightening while angering Aingeal. “Yes.”
Both of them stilled.
She heard the cruelty gathering and could not stop it quickly enough. “You have stood in my hall,” she said, voice cold now because cold was safer than trembling, “taken your place at my side, and made yourself useful enough that everyone begins to think you belong there. If you mean to answer every question put to you as though nothing in you is hidden, at least have the courtesy not to do it in front of me.”
Donal went utterly still. Not the stillness of control, the stillness of a man struck where he had no armor.
Aingeal heard herself and knew she had said too much and not nearly enough.
