Cold air rushed in, full of wet earth, smoke, and distance. Horses plunged forward. Men shouted. Seamus drove toward the ash road at speed. Cormac swung east with his riders. Reginald held the center line for fifty yards, then cut hard north where the ground lifted, and the wind carried the fire’s breath clearer into his face.
The holding came into view half a mile on. One barn was fully lit, roof already beginning to fall inward in bursts of red. Two smaller outbuildings smoked. Cattle bawled and shoved againstbroken pens. Men ran, small and frantic, against the flame. Beyond them, darker figures moved fast toward the north track, driving what stock they could seize before pursuit closed.
“Three with me!” Reginald shouted. Four came. They cut left through the muddy ditch line, using the smoke for cover, then rose hard onto the north track where the raiders least expected mounted resistance.
The first man turned too late. Reginald’s blade took him under the shoulder and drove him from the saddle. The second broke right; one of Seamus’s riders dropped him with an arrow before he found open ground.
Then the rest became noise and hooves and shouts and the old, terrible clarity of violence.
Reginald fought as himself. Not Donal. That name had burned away. Not FitzUrse the king’s man either, because no king stood behind him here.
Only the man at the center of the choice, with smoke in his lungs and Aingeal’s people in danger, and no excuse left between him and the work of keeping them alive.
A raider struck high. Reginald turned the blow and cut low across the thigh. Another wheeled behind him and lost nerve when Cormac’s men surged from the eastern flank exactly where Reginald had known they would.
Cattle scattered. One barn roof fell in with a roar of sparks. Someone screamed for water. Someone else screamed for his brother.
By the time the last of the attackers broke toward the marsh, two lay dead, three were wounded, and the rest were scattered badly enough that Seamus’s riders could hunt them after they put out the flames.
Reginald hauled the gelding around hard, breathing smoke, rain, and blood. The outbuilding nearest the lane still burned. He heard it. A child crying.
He dismounted before the horse had fully stopped and ran through the mud to the half-fallen fence, where one of Fintan’s men was trying to drag a beam clear with one useless arm.
“Inside?” Reginald shouted.
The man coughed black and hard. “Girl… back room…”
Reginald dropped the sword into the mud and raced into the smoke.
Later, he would remember heat more than sight. The taste of ash. A broken hinge under his hand. A small body curled against the far wall with both hands over her head, as though that might keep fire from choosing her.
He wrapped her in his cloak and carried her out, coughing and twisting weakly. When he thrust her into her father’s arms, the man stared at him with stunned disbelief, as if trying to reconcile rescuer and scandal into one shape.
Reginald did not wait for thanks.
By the time the fire was checked and the wounded counted, the black gelding stood trembling beneath him again, sides flecked white, one ear bloodied from some near miss Reginald had not felt in the press of things.
Seamus rode up through mud and smoke with two men behind him. His face was black with soot, his beard wet with rain. “They’re gone to ground,” he said. “We’ll not catch the last.”
“No,” Reginald answered. “But they’ll carry word back.”
Seamus looked at him hard.
“Let them,” Reginald said. He knew what word would be carried. Not that Donal O’Raida had come north. Not that a southern alliance still held.
That Reginald FitzUrse had ridden under his own name and cut them off at the ridge. Perhaps that would draw worse men. Perhaps nothing good at all.
But it was the first honest thing his name had carried in years.
He turned the horse toward the castle at last, smoke still rising behind him and rain beginning again in a fine, bitter sheet.
He might still be cast out by tomorrow night. The council might still decide one act of service could not balance weeks of deception. Aingeal might still look at him and see only the man who had made himself dear under another man’s name.
He rode toward the castle anyway.
Chapter twenty-seven
Every part of Aingeal strained toward the gate. She wanted to ride. To reach Fintan’s lower holding. To help her people with her own hands instead of standing above them like some carved figure watching ruin unfold from stone.
