Aingeal moved through it all with her chin high and her hands full.
There were too many people to comfort and too much to do. Fintan’s youngest girl had burned her palms trying to shield her face from the falling beam. An old woman from the lower holding had taken sick from fear and cold more than injury. Two cows had broken through a fence and gone half wild into the marsh. One roof would have to be rebuilt before winter tightened.
Three men were dead.
The plain grief of those who had lost what could not be mended. A son. A night’s peace. A roof. A sense of safety. Aingealunderstood those wounds better than she understood the man at the center of all the rest.
She saw him near the infirmary door.
For one sharp moment, she wondered what he was doing out of the chamber where they kept him watched. Then she noticed the guard in the archway beyond, keeping careful distance but never letting him out of sight.
Reginald knelt beside Fintan’s little girl while the physician salved her hands. He spoke to her in a low voice, not with bright nonsense, not with the hard clipped tone men used when they wanted children brave and quiet, but with something steadier than either.
Aingeal could not hear the words.
She only saw the child’s tear-streaked face lift toward him. Saw the way her shoulders loosened a little, just enough that the physician could wrap clean linen around the burns without drawing another cry from her.
Reginald did not look up.
He should have felt her there. He always had before. In the hall. On the wall. Across a yard crowded with men and horses and shouted orders. He had always seemed to know when her attention landed on him, as if some invisible cord ran between them and shivered at the slightest strain.
Perhaps he did know but chose not to show it.
He looked older this morning. Not by years, but by wear. Smoke had darkened the rough line of his jaw and worked itself into the scars on his hands. His hair, still damp from rain or washing, had dried in dark, loose strands at his brow. His sleeve was torn where the fire had caught at him. A clean strip of linen showed at his forearm where someone had bound the cut.
There was nothing left of the man called Donal O’Raida. Only a tired man in a wet tunic, soot under his nails, speaking gently to a child he had carried out of flame.
Aingeal stood in the passage and watched him until Tomas touched her elbow.
“My lady.”
She started.
Tomas’s face looked more sharply lined than usual, fatigue and calculation having cut new grooves around his mouth. “The carpenter needs your word on Fintan’s roof. He says if he starts with the barn first, the lower shed may not stand another storm.”
Aingeal dragged her gaze from Reginald and back into the day. “The roof first,” she said. “The barn can wait. The people cannot.”
Tomas nodded once and marked the decision on the tablet in his hand. He did not glance toward the infirmary door.
By noon, the dead had been laid out in the little antechamber beside the chapel, and the wounded had been counted properly. Fintan himself had stopped trying to refuse the broth thrust at him by kitchen girls old enough to know men took orders best from women unimpressed by grief.
Aingeal moved from chamber to hall to storeroom and back again, her cloak still carrying the clean wet scent of rain from the wall where she had watched the riders return.
She found Étaín at last in the lower gallery, handing out dry blankets with all her brightness stripped away and only steadiness left.
Her cousin’s hair had been braided back more tightly than usual, as if she too had no patience today for softness. A child clung to her skirts while she bent to settle a folded wool blanket over an old man’s shoulders. When she straightened and saw Aingeal, something tender and wary crossed her face at once. “You have not eaten,” Étaín said.
Aingeal nearly smiled.
Of all the hurts moving through the castle, Étaín would still find the empty place where breakfast should have been.
“I have no appetite.”
“That has never stopped me from forcing food on you before.”
“No,” Aingeal said, and this time the ghost of a smile touched her lips before fading again. “It has not.”
Étaín came to her when the old man was covered properly. They stood side by side in the gallery for a moment, looking down over the hall below.
