Donal.
The moment Étaín saw him again, the odd tug returned. Familiar.
He stopped when he noticed her and bowed first to Aingeal. “My lady.”
Then to Étaín. “Lady Étaín.”
Up close, in daylight, the unease sharpened. It was not only his face. It was the whole of him. The contained stillness. The way he held himself. The scar at his brow. The gravity in his gaze when it settled on a person, as though he were always measuring what harm might yet come from this moment.
Aingeal rose at once. “What is it?”
“Seamus asks for your decision about the riders to the eastern ridge.”
“Tell him I am coming.”
He inclined his head.
Étaín should have let him go. Instead, she heard herself say, almost idly, “You were training the boys this morning.”
He glanced at her. “Yes, lady.”
“You are patient with them.”
Something in his expression shifted. Caution adjusting itself. “They will learn faster if they are corrected properly.”
Étaín smiled. “You make severity sound charitable.”
Aingeal, very still by the table now, said nothing.
Donal gave the smallest hint of amusement. “Only in skilled company would that be taken for praise.”
Étaín laughed. That feeling sharpened. His voice. Not merely the sound of it, but the cadence. She had heard that tone somewhere before, stripped of calm, carrying under a different roof, in a different room, beneath worse circumstances. The certainty flashed and vanished so quickly she almost doubted it, but enough remained to set her nerves on edge.
Aingeal interrupted before Étaín could follow the thought.
“Was there anything else?”
Donal turned back toward her. “No, my lady.”
For the briefest instant, Aingeal and Donal looked at one another, and something moved between them.
Intimate enough that Étaín felt like an intruder merely witnessing it. She watched the look pass and thought, with sudden certainty, that whatever lay there was already dangerous.
Donal bowed once more and stepped back into the corridor.
Aingeal followed him a moment later, leaving Étaín alone in the solar with cooling breakfast and an unease she could no longer laugh away.
For several breaths, she sat without moving. Then she rose and went to the open door, listening to the fading murmur of their voices in the passage.
Sir Donal O’Raida. The name did not fit the man.
Étaín had spent years being underestimated by people who mistook warmth for simplicity. She knew the advantage in being thought harmless. She knew how much could be learned by smiling, by listening, by letting others speak until they revealed the seam in their own disguise.
Sir Donal had seams.
And Aingeal, proud, guarded Aingeal, was already close enough to be wounded by them.
Étaín looked down the empty corridor. Whatever Donal O’Raida was hiding, she would find it. Not because she wished to harm him.
