Aingeal did not remember leaving him. Later, she would remember fragments with cruel precision: the cold latch beneath her hand, the long dim passage outside the old council chamber, a servant flattening herself against the wall to let her pass, the sound of rain echoing through the corridor.
But the spaces between those things were gone. As though her mind had split there and refused to mend. She only knew that somehow her feet had carried her not to her own chamber, nor to the chapel, nor to the battlements where wind might have lashed some sense back into her.
They had carried her to Étaín.
Always, when hurt cut too deep, she had gone to Étaín.
As a girl, when she had fallen on the river stones and hidden the blood because she did not want anyone to call her weak. As a daughter, when her father died and the castle filled with voices, pity, and hands she did not know. As a woman afterward, when griefs grew heavier, and less noble.
She found her cousin kneeling beside an open chest near the hearth, sorting ribbons or silks or some other small bright thingthat had no business existing in a world where men took dead names and wore them like cloaks.
Étaín looked up. The color left her face at once. “Aingeal.”
Aingeal shut the door behind her and tried to speak, but nothing came. She stood with one hand still on the latch, looking at Étaín and seeing, not beauty first, nor brightness, nor the lively woman who could warm an entire room by entering it.
Safety.
Étaín crossed the chamber in three quick steps and reached for her.
Aingeal let out a torn breath. Then she was shaking. Not weeping prettily. Not one proud tear sliding down a composed face. This was uglier than that. Her whole body trembled with the effort of holding itself together and failing.
Étaín wrapped both arms around her and held her hard, one hand moving slowly up and down her back, saying nothing. Only holding her steady with a fierce embrace, as if she meant to keep Aingeal’s bones from splitting apart beneath her skin.
“He told me,” Aingeal managed at last, the words breaking on the way out. “He told me everything.”
Étaín drew back only enough to see her face. Tears already shone in her own eyes, but her voice stayed steady. “Come sit.”
Aingeal let herself be led to the cushioned bench beside the hearth. She sat because her knees would not have trusted standing.
Étaín knelt before her rather than taking the chair opposite. It was an old instinct between them.
It made Aingeal want to weep harder.
The fire was low but warm. Rain brushed at the shutters. The chamber smelled of lavender, wool, and the faint sweetness of beeswax.
Étaín waited.
Aingeal looked down at her own hands. They were clenched so tightly her knuckles had gone white. “He buried Donal on the road,” she said and her own voice sounded strange to her, as if another woman spoke through her mouth. “He found him dying. He took his name because he meant to live.” She laughed once, a small, awful sound. “Such a simple thing.”
Étaín’s hands tightened around hers.
“He never meant to marry me under the lie,” Aingeal went on, each word scraping. “He meant to leave before the wedding. He meant to leave all along.” That, more than any other part of it, made her throat close. This was the shape the knife took when it turned inward.
He had meant to go. He had kissed her. Held her. Let her hope. And all the while, he had meant to go.
Étaín’s mouth parted as if she meant to speak, then closed again.
Aingeal swallowed hard and forced the worst of it out. “His name is Reginald FitzUrse.”
Étaín closed her eyes briefly. When she opened them again, she asked the question gently, though the answer already lived in both of them. “And Becket?”
Aingeal nodded once. “He said it himself.” Her voice thinned. “One of the four. One of the men who killed him.”
For a few breaths, neither of them said anything.
The fire settled in the grate with a soft sigh of ash. The rain thickened, then softened again.
Aingeal stared at the floor. “I knew there was something hidden in him. I knew it from the first. I knew he wore silence like armor and carried some old violence under his skin, and still…” Her mouth trembled. “I still let myself…” The words failed.
