Aingeal went on, each word chosen with care sharp enough to cut her from within. “He will not remain here as groom. He will not remain here as ally. That is done. But before I expel a man who knows our border lines, our watches, our weaknesses, and whose skill has already helped hold them, I will know whether I do so for the good of this castle or for the satisfaction of seeing him gone.”
Brennach looked at her for a long time. Then he nodded once.
Tomas lowered his gaze, perhaps in agreement, perhaps in relief.
Seamus looked like a man chewing iron.
Father Cillian said quietly, “Then what do you decree?”
Aingeal kept her eyes on Reginald. Not beloved. Not the man she had wanted. Only the danger before her now, and thejudgment she had no choice but to make. “He remains under watch,” she said. “No horse. No weapon. No free movement through the castle. He speaks to no servant, no guard, no messenger, and no member of this household unless I permit it.”
Reginald’s expression did not change.
“If the border stays quiet through tomorrow,” she continued, “we expel him at first light the following day.”
“And if it does not stay quiet?” Tomas asked.
Aingeal drew one slow breath. “Then we decide what this castle needs,” she said, “not what our wounds demand.”
Silence followed.
No one challenged her. For the first time since Ciarán had spoken in the yard, Aingeal felt the room settle around her, not comfortably, not kindly, but with recognition.
She had not undone the damage. She had not made herself whole. But she had ruled.
Reginald bowed his head once. “As you command.”
Aingeal looked to the guards. “Take him to the west chamber. Two men outside the door. Seamus will choose them.”
Seamus nodded once, grimly satisfied.
Reginald turned without protest.
As the guards moved to flank him, Aingeal forced herself not to watch too closely. Forced herself not to remember another time he had moved through her halls with a sword at his side and a place waiting for him beside her.
He passed into the corridor, and the door closed behind him.
Aingeal remained seated until the sound of his footsteps had faded. Only then did she look back at her council. “Now,” she said, her voice steadier than anything inside her, “show me the northern watch reports.”
Chapter twenty-six
Reginald slept badly and rose before dawn.
He stared out through the slit window. He could see only a strip of paling sky and the black line of the wall. He was not Donal O’Raida now. Not bridegroom. Not the man seated at Aingeal’s right hand while the castle slowly accepted him as part of its life.
He was a man under watch in a chamber that had once belonged to some lesser cousin of the house, with one narrow bed, one chair, and two guards outside the door.
The fire in the small hearth had burned down to ash. The room smelled of damp wool and cold stone. Rain had stopped sometime in the night, but the air still carried the washed, sharp chill that came after hard weather.
He dressed in silence. No sword waited for him. That absence should not have felt as intimate as it did. A man accustomed to steel missed its weight the way another man might miss a hand. He had been stripped of more than a weapon. He had been stripped of usefulness, and there was a particular cruelty in standing idle while the castle around him moved on in daily life.
He had offered to leave, but Aingeal had not let him.
That memory sat bitter in him. The council sat worse. Aingeal at the head of the table, pale and steady by force, speaking of border need and wounded pride as though she were not bleeding from the heart at that very moment. He had watched her choose duty over pain and had wanted, absurdly, impossibly, to go to his knees before her and tell her that all of it was true.
The lie. The blood. The leaving. The love.
Love. He had not let himself use the word even alone until it was too late.
