The crowd parted before her.
She felt their silence like hands against her skin, their stares like cold pinpricks all over her body.
At the threshold, she stopped and turned.
The false Donal had not moved.
The man she had begun to love stood where the stolen name had just been torn from him. His face looked older now. Not by years, but by truth.
She did not know who he was. Only that he was not Donal and that Donal was dead. That the future she had almost begun to build in the privacy of her own heart had just been broken in public before a hundred witnesses.
“Bring him inside,” she said. She looked to Seamus. “Disarm him.” The words cost her more than she let show.
Seamus hesitated only long enough for pain to cross his face. Then he moved.
The man they had called Donal did not resist. He unbuckled his sword himself and offered it hilt-first. Seamus took it, jaw clenched, and stepped back with the weapon in both hands.
“And the man from the south,” Aingeal said.
Ciarán bowed his head once.
They obeyed.
The Great Hall swallowed them into torchlight and stone and stunned silence. Men stood where they were, half risen from benches, cups untouched. Servants lined the walls. Guards gathered near the doors. The household had become witness now, whether she wished it or not.
Aingeal went to the high table and set both hands flat upon the surface. She needed its steadiness. When she looked up, the man who was not Donal stood below the dais beneath a hundred eyes, stripped of the only name by which she had allowed herself to hope.
For one terrible moment, no one spoke.
Then Aingeal lifted her chin. “Tell us who you are.”
Chapter twenty-three
They had put Reginald in the old council chamber to wait. Not in a cell, not yet. The chamber had one door, one narrow window, one long table scarred by years of hands, maps, and decisions that had bent men’s lives like young branches. Two guards stood outside. Their shadows crossed the threshold whenever one shifted his weight.
He had not answered Aingeal in the hall. Not fully.
When she had asked who he was, with the whole household watching and the dead man’s name torn from him, he had given only the first truth. “Not Donal O’Raida.”
The rest had lodged in his throat beneath a hundred eyes.
Perhaps that was cowardice. Perhaps it was mercy. Perhaps it was only another instinct of a man who had survived too long by choosing when and where to bleed.
Aingeal had looked at him as though even that small answer had struck her. Then she had ordered him brought here until she decided what was to be done.
So now he stood at the window and looked down into the yard he had entered under another man’s name.
Rain had begun in earnest. It washed over the stones, darkened the horses’ backs, and ran from the eaves in thin, steady threads. Men crossed the yard with their heads bent against it. More than once, he saw one glance up toward the chamber and then away too quickly.
He did not blame them. He had known this hour would come. Beneath every day he had stolen inside these walls, he had known it. The lie had been too large and too costly to hold forever. He had imagined many endings for it. Étaín drawing truth into the light. Aingeal forcing it from him in some private room. Rumor arriving from the south in the cold, bloodless form of a letter.
He had not imagined a mud-spattered retainer from O’Raida’s lands speaking the truth in the yard before the whole household.
Not because public disgrace wounded him but because it had wounded her. That thought would not leave him.
He had seen the moment it struck her. Not only shock. Not only betrayal. Humiliation. The cold, naked knowledge that every servant, every guard, every councilman had just watched the ground vanish beneath her feet.
And still she had stayed upright.
