“At first,” she repeated.
“Yes.”
Rain thickened at the window. Each strike against the stone sounded like time running out.
“When did you decide to stay?” she asked.
“We made the pact. I did not mean to break it. But then…” He stopped, disgusted by how defensive it sounded even to him. “No. That is not the whole of it.”
Her gaze sharpened.
“I stayed because by then I had already entered your hall under his name. Your people had seen me. Your council had placed me beside you. Flight would have made a spectacle of youbefore I had done even one useful thing to balance the hurt I had brought.”
She stared at him.
He saw the memory move through her then: the feast, the public declaration, the hall full of witnesses, the way sudden disappearance would indeed have made her a mockery before men already eager for her to fail.
Still, she said, “That is not the whole truth.”
He could not lie to her now, even by omission. “No,” he said. “It is not.”
The room held very still.
“The whole truth,” he said, “is that by the time I still meant to leave, it was no longer only politics keeping me.”
Silence.
Aingeal’s face tightened, and for one brief heartbeat, he saw naked pain break through the control she had worn since the yard. It vanished almost at once. Not before it cut him.
“So you meant to leave,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Before the wedding.”
“Yes.”
“You never meant to marry me under that lie.”
“No.”
Something in her seemed to brace and collapse at once.
It was a mercy, he knew. The only one left to offer. Yet he saw that it wounded her too, because it stripped away even the false comfort of imagining he had intended a future with her.
She laughed once, low and without mirth. “How generous.”
“Aingeal…”
“No.” She shook her head hard. “Do not use mercy to make yourself seem better to me. I do not know yet what I think of you, but I know enough not to mistake this for kindness.”
The rebuke landed and stayed.
She lifted her chin. “And your real name?”
A coldness moved through him, as if the storm had come indoors.
“My name is Reginald FitzUrse.” He did not look away when he said it. He owed her at least that.
