Étaín’s hand came to rest lightly over hers on the gallery rail. “Because deception and redemption are not the same thing,” she said quietly.
Aingeal looked at her.
“He lied,” Étaín continued. “He hid himself beneath a dead man’s name and let himself become dear. That is true. He mayfirst have done those things to survive and later for reasons far more tangled, but he did them. None of that vanishes because he fought well yesterday.”
“No.”
“No.” Étaín glanced once toward Reginald below, then back. “But neither does what he chose yesterday vanish because he lied before.”
Aingeal’s throat tightened. “What am I to do with that?”
“See it.”
The answer was too simple. Too hard in its simplicity. “Only that?”
“It is more difficult than it sounds.”
Aingeal looked down again.
Reginald had knelt beside one of Seamus’s younger riders whose arm had been laid open across the biceps. The boy was trying, with strained dignity, not to grimace while the physician stitched him. Reginald said something dry enough that even from above, Aingeal saw the boy’s mouth twitch despite himself.
He had no right to be good at this, no right to stand among her people stripped of alliance and excuse and still move as though some deep part of him had been made to answer suffering instead of turning away from it. No right to make mercy look natural in the same hands that had once struck in Canterbury.
And yet he did.
Aingeal remembered his face in the council chamber as he told her he would leave. Remembered how final he had made it sound, as if departure were the only gift left for him to give her. She had hated him for it then. Hated him because some hidden part of her had wanted to stop him, and because she despised herself for wanting that at all.
Now, watching him below among the hurt and weary, she understood something worse.
If he had left before the attack, Fintan’s daughter would be dead. The holding might have fallen. The castle would have one less shield against whatever came next.
He had saved them.
Love was a traitor, she thought. It made everything harder to hate cleanly.
“Aingeal.”
Étaín’s voice pulled her back.
Her cousin was watching her with that same grave affection. Not pressing. Not softening truth. Only holding enough quiet for honesty to step into it. “I am still angry,” Aingeal said.
“You should be.”
“I still do not trust him.”
Étaín nodded. “You should not trust too quickly.”
Aingeal shook her head. “I still love him.”
Étaín’s expression gentled, though she did not smile. “Yes.”
Aingeal looked away. Saying the words now did not break her as they had the night before. It only made the ache steadier. More real. Less like a storm. More like a wound she would carry whether she wished to or not.
“And I still want him gone for lying,” she said. “And still…”
“And still?” Étaín prompted softly.
Aingeal looked back toward the hall, where Reginald now bent with two others to lift a pallet so the rushes beneath it could be stripped and replaced. “And still I am grateful he stayed yesterday.”
