He closed his eyes briefly.
The guards outside shifted. One cleared his throat. Rain tapped at the slit window. Somewhere farther down the passage, a door opened, then shut.
Then footsteps came. Not the hesitant tread of a servant. Not Brennach’s heavy step or Seamus’s martial stride.
Aingeal.
Reginald turned before the latch lifted.
She entered alone, no witnesses but rain and stone. She shut the door behind her and stood with one hand still on the latch, as though the simple act of remaining in the room with him cost more than she meant to show.
The chamber was dim. The day had gone so gray that the narrow window offered little light, and the one candle on the table gave more shadow than warmth. He could see the strain in her clearly. She looked as if some invisible hand had drawn her tight at every joint. Her color was too pale beneath the storm-burned flush in her cheeks. Her mouth looked as though she had held it firm too long, and it had forgotten any softer shape.
Her eyes were worst of all. Wounded. Quietly, deeply, publicly wounded.
Something in Reginald’s chest tightened so hard it made breathing briefly difficult. “Aingeal,” he said.
She flinched at the sound of her name in his mouth now that the lie had been ripped open. “Do not.”
He inclined his head once. “As you wish.”
She came farther into the chamber then but did not sit. Did not even approach the table. She stopped three paces from him, as if the space itself were a shield she needed.
For a few moments, neither of them spoke. The silence had thick grief in it.
At last, she said, “Tell me everything.”
Reginald looked at her and knew that whatever he said next would take something from her that could never be given back. Yet there was no reason left to withhold anything. None that did not rot on contact with daylight.
He began where the lie had begun. “O’Raida died on the road north.”
Aingeal did not move.
“He had been attacked south of Ardglas,” Reginald said. “Half a day from the high road, near a leaning ash.”
Her face changed almost imperceptibly. Ciarán’s words, returning.
Reginald forced the rest out evenly. “He was wounded beyond saving when I found him. Raiders had come on him beforedawn. By the time I reached him, he knew he was dying. He spoke little. Not enough to tell me all I should have known. Only enough that I understood where he had meant to go.”
Her hands tightened at her sides.
“He died before noon,” Reginald said. “I buried him myself.”
Aingeal’s voice came low and steady. “And then you put on his name.”
“Yes.”
“His ring.”
“Yes.”
She absorbed that as if it were another blow. “Why?”
He could have offered a gentler version. A nobler one. But there had been too many gentler lies already. “Because I meant to live,” he said.
Something in her face changed at that. Not surprise, exactly. A kind of bleak recognition, as though she understood too well what desperate people could justify in the name of survival.
He went on before she could ask again. “I had no plan beyond that. The road was open. O’Raida was dead. I was hunted by my past, and I took what lay before me.” His mouth hardened. “At first, I meant only to reach the next place of shelter.”
