Seamus came through coated in mud and soot, one cheek cut open and bleeding into his beard. Cormac followed with two men carrying a wounded boy between them.
Then Reginald rode in.
He came slower than the others only because the black gelding was near spent, and the cloak that had wrapped the rescued child still hung dark over one shoulder.
The yard, which had been full of noise a heartbeat before, altered around him. He dismounted stiffly. One of Fintan’s men took the horse. Reginald stood for a moment in the rain, breathing hard, and Aingeal saw the exact instant he felt the whole castle looking at him.
He lifted his head.
Their eyes met across the distance between wall and yard.
There was soot on his jaw. Rain in his dark hair. A tear in one sleeve where a beam or blade had caught him. He looked stripped down, exhausted, and more himself than she had ever seen him.
Not Donal. Whatever came now would come to Reginald FitzUrse alone.
And still, still, he had saved them.
Aingeal did not move. Neither did he.
For one suspended moment, the whole impossible shape of it stood between them: the lie, the love, the betrayal, the fire, the field, the child he had saved, the castle still standing because he had chosen not to ride away.
It was not forgiveness.
But it was no longer only condemnation.
Chapter twenty-eight
That night they did not lock Reginald in the chamber, but neither did they set him free.
Two guards remained outside the door, posted more from caution than hatred now, though Reginald knew how quickly caution could sour. The castle had gone quieter after the attack, but not peaceful. Too many wounded had been brought in from the lower holding. Too many frightened villagers slept in corners never meant for sleep.
Reginald sat on the edge of the narrow bed and listened to the castle breathe around him.
A man coughed somewhere down the passage. A child whimpered and was hushed. Water sloshed in a bucket. One guard shifted outside the door, and the board beneath him creaked.
Reginald had washed the soot from his face and hands, but not all of it. A black crescent still marked one nail. A dark smear remained at his cuff where he had missed it. Smoke lived stubbornly in the wool of his sleeve. His body ached in the dull, honest way it always did after hard riding and violence. Ashallow cut burned along his forearm where a splintered beam had scored him. His shoulders still felt the weight of the child he had carried from the fire.
None of that mattered.
In his mind, he could still see Aingeal on the wall above the gate, rain on her face. Pain etched into her lips. Authority wrapped so tightly around grief that the two had become one hard thing.
He had ridden back for her people. He had stayed because he could not leave her alone beneath the stain of his scandal.
And still, when he had looked up and found her watching, he had seen in her face that nothing essential had changed.
He was still the man who had lied to her.
He leaned forward, forearms braced on his knees, and let his hands hang loose between them. If he had it to do all over again, he would never have lied to her. And that was the catch. He would have been turned out if he had used his real name. He never would have met her. He sighed softly.
Canterbury came when he was tired.
Not always in dreams. Sometimes in waking, in the precise moment a room went quiet enough that nothing remained between him and memory. A corridor narrowed, becoming a nave. The smell of damp wool turned to cold incense. A bootstep elsewhere in the keep struck stone and became the echo of the cathedral.
Tonight there was no fending it off.
For years, he had told himself the same story because it made the shape of his life bearable. The king raged. Becket defied. They acted.
Simple, only it had never been simple.
