Reginald reached into his belt and drew out the folded account Tomas had given him before the attack. The edges had softened from rain and body heat. He unfolded it and read the same linesagain by candlelight until he nearly hated the unknown clerk who had copied them.
The king in wrath spoke lament, not command, and those who heard zeal where law had not been given made of anger their own authority…
Wrath, not command. Their own authority.
A churchman’s wording. A tidy judgment laid over heat and blood by a man who had likely never held a sword while a kingdom trembled. Reginald wanted to despise it. Wanted to despise the hand that wrote it.
Instead, he read it again.
The candle bent in a draft and righted itself. Wax slid down one side in a pale line.
He stared at the words until they blurred, and memory rose against them.
Henry’s voice had been sharp and furious. Tired of Becket’s defiance. Tired of the Church’s posturing. Tired of being thwarted by the very man who should have stood with him. Reginald remembered every line of tension in that room more clearly than he remembered whole seasons of the years since.
The king’s pacing. The crack of temper. The exhaustion beneath the rage.
The look shared among the four of them afterward, quick and hard, as if each had heard the same call and needed only one other man to confirm it.
Had Henry commanded murder? No. And their first intent had not been murder, but submission. Bring Becket before the king. Force the matter closed. End the defiance. Restore order.
But Becket had resisted.
That had not troubled Reginald before.
Kings did not always need to speak plainly to be obeyed. Men bred to service learned to hear desire beneath fury, necessity beneath complaint, command beneath rage. That had long beenhis defense. It rose in him even now, sharp and familiar, like a sword hilt falling naturally into his palm.
And yet…
The longer he sat with it, the less certain the defense felt. Because the question was no longer only whether King Henry had commanded.
The worse question was why Reginald had been so ready to hear command in rage at all.
He bowed his head and closed his eyes.
The cathedral came back. Cold stone. Echo. The hard ring of boots. The monks’ fear. The white of Becket’s robes. The first rise of argument. The terrible speed with which speech gave way to steel.
For years, Reginald had told himself the act belonged first to the king’s fury, then to the collective momentum of all four knights together. Shared rage. Shared loyalty. Shared blindness.
But when he stripped it bare now, another truth stood waiting beneath the old one.
The others had followed him. Not in every stroke. Not in every breath. But he had pressed them forward. He had demanded. He had led with certainty when another man might have hesitated long enough for mercy to enter.
The knowledge sat in him like a wound that had never fully healed because he had never allowed himself to touch it.
He remembered not reluctance, but readiness. Not horror at what might be required, but a grim assent rising in him before the others had fully known what shape the day would take. He had believed action was needed. Believed steel ended what words only prolonged. Believed himself the sort of man who must sometimes do what weaker men would not.
Was that obedience? Partly.
Was it also pride? Impatience? A soldier’s instinct sharpened until it mistook force for order?
He dragged a hand over his face. The old sentence no longer held.
I merely obeyed.
Even the word merely had begun to sound cowardly.
He thought of Aingeal again, because he thought of her too often now, and because once truth opened in one place, it seemed to drag every other truth behind it.
