The rider came in just before the midday meal with road mud on his hem and a bishop’s seal half-hidden in the fold of his sleeve.
Reginald saw him from the practice yard, where he was helping one of the boys repair a shield. The horse clattered through the gate damp with sweat. The rider dismounted stiffly, spoke first to the guard, then to Tomas, who had come from the hall already wearing the expression of a man bracing to be inconvenienced by written news.
A clerk, Reginald thought. Or some priest’s man. Ordinarily, he would have let it pass. Messengers came and went every week. They brought quarrels over land, pleas for grain, warnings about roads, demands for men. A castle was tied together by paper and wax as surely as by stone.
But when the newcomer pushed back his hood, something old tightened inside Reginald.
The man was a cleric. Not high-ranking. Narrow-faced. Wind-burned. His tonsure had grown out past discipline, and his hands were reddened by cold. Yet the Church sat plainly on himall the same. A small bronze cross caught the weak daylight at his throat. So did the careful stillness of men whose authority came from words rather than swords.
Tomas took the packet the rider offered.
The cleric said something low.
Tomas’s gaze flicked toward the chapel before dropping back to the letter.
Reginald bent again to the shield, though his hands had gone too precise. He drove the peg through leather and wood and told himself there was no reason for the prickling at the back of his neck.
By the evening meal, the cleric had not left.
He had bathed, eaten, spoken at length with Father Cillian and Tomas, and been given a place at the high table with the solemn courtesy reserved for men who came under church business.
Reginald entered the Great Hall last.
He had learned the habit in war: measure the space, the exits, who sat armed, who watched too openly. Excommunication had only sharpened it.
Tonight the hall was warm with roasted meat, tallow, and damp wool steaming near the fire. At the dais, Brennach sat at Aingeal’s left. Étaín was farther down, bright as candlelight even when still. Father Cillian sat near the visiting cleric, as if church business might need translating before the hall could digest it.
Aingeal did not look at Reginald when he took his place beside her.
That hurt more than it should have.
Since the scene at the evening meal the night before, her coldness had come in fine, measured increments. She had spoken to him only when necessity required it. In council, she had not leaned close. On the battlements, she had chosen Brennach’s side. Even the accidental courtesies that had begun to grow between them, a passing cup, a low murmur, a glanceheld beyond propriety, had vanished so completely he wondered if he had imagined them. Her coldness sat in his gut like a stone.
He kept his face unreadable and reached for the bread.
The cleric was speaking before the meal had settled. “…the bishop of Salisbury says the old divisions have not healed,” he told Father Cillian. “Some wounds in Christendom are too useful to powerful men to be allowed to close.”
Father Cillian sighed into his wine. “That could be said of half the Church’s quarrels.”
“And all the Crown’s,” Tomas muttered.
Politics, church disputes, old hostilities were as common to supper as salt. Reginald broke his bread and listened without seeming to.
The cleric dabbed his mouth with a cloth. “Canterbury is still invoked in every argument from York to Winchester. One would think Archbishop Becket died yesterday, not years past.”
The name struck Reginald beneath the ribs. He kept chewing.
The hall did not change. A spoon scraped wood. Someone asked for ale. A child laughed before being hushed. The world continued.
Only inside him did the air tighten.
Father Cillian shook his head. “Men make martyrs or villains according to their need. Neither makes for truth.”
“True enough,” said the cleric. “But the story grows with every telling. Some say the king wept. Some say he did not. Some say the knights were driven by zeal. Others by ambition. In every version, Becket dies once for God and ten times more for politics.”
To the men around the table, it was history. A caution. A sermon dressed as a story. To Reginald, it was stone beneath his boots and blood striking bright across it.
“Do they still name the knights?” Brennach asked.
