Étaín squeezed her hand once. “That is not forgiveness.”
“No.”
“It is not weakness.”
Aingeal let out a breath. “No,” she said again, quieter.
Below them, Reginald straightened.
As if some old instinct still lived between them despite all her efforts to kill it, he looked up, and their eyes met.
He stared at her, tired, stripped bare of false names, smoke and rain still lingering in him, and held the gaze for one honest heartbeat before lowering his own and turning back to the wounded man beside him.
Aingeal’s hand tightened on the rail. She could not forgive him. She could not trust him. But she could no longer dismiss him as only a lie. That certainty came with as much grief as relief, because lies could be cast out. Men were harder. Especially men who kept choosing rightly when nothing remained to bind them but their own character.
She stood beside Étaín looking down at Reginald among her people. For the first time since the rider from the south had stripped him of Donal’s name, something in her judgment shifted.
She saw the lie.
She saw the man.
And she saw, with painful clarity, that he was becoming the man he now chose to be.
Chapter thirty
The castle had finally quieted into weary stillness. Even the yard had gone still. Only the rain remained, soft now against the outer stone.
Reginald came to the chapel under watch.
The guard followed at a distance through the passage and stopped outside the chapel door, close enough to remind him he was not free, far enough to allow him the dignity of prayer if prayer had been his purpose.
It was not.
Reginald found Aingeal standing alone near the front rail. He stopped just inside the doorway.
Two candles had already been lit. Their flames trembled in the draft, thin and stubborn. She held one more taper in her hand and had not yet lowered it to the wick. Gold light caught in the dark fall of her red hair and along the line of her cheek, but it did nothing to warm the grief in her face.
He had come to find her and still was not prepared to face her. He was not certain he would survive what he meant to say, andsome old part of him still preferred a defended lie to naked truth, even now. It was easier.
Then Aingeal spoke without turning. “If you have come to tell me you are leaving before dawn, save it.”
His mouth tightened. “No.”
She lowered the taper at last. The third candle caught. She stood a moment longer with her head bowed, then set the spent taper aside and turned to face him.
The chapel made honesty harder. Perhaps that was why he had come there. The saints on the walls. The crucifix above the altar. The cold stone underfoot. None of it would save him from himself, but it stripped away the comfort of pretending.
Aingeal looked tired beyond what sleep could mend. There was no softness in her face tonight, but neither was there the raw, torn look she had worn after the council and the fire. She looked like a woman standing upright because there was no one left to do it for her.
Reginald came farther into the chapel, but not so near that she would think herself cornered. He stopped before the second pew and let his hands rest at his sides. To fold them would have looked too much like prayer, and he had not come asking God for anything.
God had never given him anything. He did not pretend He would start now. “I have told you what happened with Donal,” he said. “And who I am.”
Aingeal did not move. “Yes.”
“I have not told you about Canterbury.”
Aingeal’s gaze held his. She did not invite him to continue, but she did not stop him either.
