“Will you give me that?”
He looked at her in the lantern light and felt the trap of his own heart close. “I am trying to learn how.”
Aingeal nodded once. “I do not want you to leave tonight,” she whispered.
The words struck harder than any command. He could not answer without betraying too much, so he bowed his head.
She turned toward the door, then paused. “Donal.”
He looked up.
“Do not let Étaín frighten you into running.”
Too late, he thought. Aloud, he said, “I will not run.”
She left him with the lantern light thinning behind her.
Reginald stood in the stable long after she was gone, one hand on the horse’s neck, the other pressed against the rough wood of the stall.
Étaín suspected. Aingeal hurt. Canterbury waited.
He had chosen to stay. For the first time, staying felt less like concealment than a sentence he had passed upon himself. And yet, beneath the fear, there was one dangerous mercy.
Aingeal had come back to him.
Chapter sixteen
The ring of blade against blade rose from the yard below in a clean, measured rhythm and drew Étaín out of sleep more effectively than any maid could have managed with basin and chatter. She gritted her teeth, thought of putting the pillow over her head, then finally went still enough to listen.
It was not the wild clash of men in panic, nor the ragged confusion that followed bloodshed. This sound had shape. Discipline. Intention.
For a moment, she remained beneath the blankets, warm in the hollow she had made through the night, staring at the pale gray light pressing at the shutters. The chamber smelled faintly of lavender, damp wool, and the cold ash left in the hearth.
In the courtyard below, someone had been awake long before dawn softened the sky, much too early for her.
Whoever practiced below had discipline bred so deeply into him that even the cadence of his training carried meaning. It sounded, oddly enough, like conversation.
Iron and breath. Question and answer.
Curious, Étaín threw back the blankets and slipped from bed. The rushes were cold beneath her bare feet. She crossed the chamber, pulled one shutter inward, and leaned into the damp morning.
Mist clung low in the inner yard. It drifted in pale ribbons over the stones and softened the edges of everything below, as if the castle had not yet fully decided to wake. Boys with practice shields clustered near the wall in a restless knot of limbs and eagerness. A groom crossed the far side of the yard with a bridle over one arm.
In the open space near the armory, two men faced one another.
Seamus she knew at once. Thick through the shoulders, compact, impossible to mistake. He fought like a man hewn from oak root and hammered iron, every movement carrying the memory of older, uglier battles.
The other man…
Étaín narrowed her eyes.
Sir Donal O’Raida moved with the same unsettling economy he had shown at supper. Nothing in him was for display. No flourish. No useless turn meant to draw watching eyes. He struck, recovered, shifted.
It made him seem controlled.
Seamus came in hard and low, all pressure and force. Donal met him, turned, and put himself exactly where the next blow could not land. The motion was so smooth Étaín almost missed how it happened. One heartbeat they were squared. The next, the whole shape of the exchange had changed, not through showmanship but through inevitability, as if the world had always meant him to be standing precisely there.
A boy rushed in at Seamus’s barked command, and Donal turned to meet the new threat at once. His body simply understood before the lad had fully committed himself.
