“No.” Étaín leaned closer, her voice low and steady. “Listen to me. He lied. He let himself matter under falsehood. He let hope grow where truth should have come first. Those are his sins. Do not take them into yourself and call them yours.”
Aingeal shook her head helplessly. “You do not understand.”
“Then help me.”
She whispered, “Because some part of me still wants him.”
Étaín’s face softened at once.
“I still want him to stay.”
The room went quiet around the words.
Étaín took Aingeal’s face in both hands then, as if she were something furious and fragile and beloved all at once. “That,” she said, tears standing bright in her own eyes, “is grief. Not shame.”
Aingeal closed her eyes. “It feels like both.”
“Then feel both.” Étaín’s thumbs brushed the tears from her cheeks. “But do not mistake your love for your ruin. Loving him does not stain you. Being deceived does not make you foolish. It makes you wounded.”
Aingeal opened her eyes again.
Étaín’s face was so dear in that moment she could hardly bear to look at it.
“You are too kind.”
“No,” Étaín said softly. “I am refusing to let you be cruel to yourself because a man was cruel in the way he chose silence.”
Aingeal let out one long, shaking breath. The pain did not lessen. But it changed shape. It became something she could hold without it cutting quite so cleanly through her.
At last, she bowed forward and rested her forehead against Étaín’s shoulder as she had when they were girls. Étaín wrapped both arms around her again and held her there in the hush of rain and fire and shared sorrow.
After a long while, when the worst of the shaking had passed, Aingeal whispered, “What am I to do now?”
Étaín’s hand moved slowly through her hair.
“Tonight?” she said. “Mourn. Let yourself be broken where you are safe.” Her voice steadied. “Tomorrow, you rule.”
Aingeal let out a weak, broken sound that was almost a laugh. “That sounds like you.”
“It sounds like you,” Étaín corrected.
The tears had slowed by then. Not ended but changed into something quieter. The kind that came when grief realized it would not kill quickly and meant instead to remain.
Aingeal drew back and looked into the fire.
Reginald would go. Donal had never truly existed. The future she had begun, in secret, to imagine had been built beneath a false name and a buried truth. And still the deepest ache in her was not that the alliance was broken. Not even that the hall had watched her humiliation. What broke her was not that he would go.
It was that she still wanted him to stay.
Chapter twenty-five
The council chamber smelled of damp wool, smoke, and the faint sourness of wet leather drying too near the fire. Men had come in from the weather with dark hems and harder faces, and not one of them looked as though he had slept.
Neither had Aingeal. She sat at the head of the table in the carved chair that had belonged to her father before it belonged to her. The wood felt colder than it should through the layers of her gown. Her hands were steady because she had commanded them to be.
The rest of her felt scraped hollow.
Tomas sat to her right with a small stack of notes laid before him. Beside him, Brennach was broad, grim, and silent in the way of men who intended to speak only when their words would land hardest. Seamus stood instead of sitting, one shoulder braced against the wall near the hearth, arms folded as though he mistrusted the whole business too much to rest for it. Father Cillian sat near the end of the table with his hands clasped.
