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Tadhg shook his head. “Not him.”
“Heard he was shipwrecked coming back from crusade.”
Tadhg turned to him slowly. “Are you certain?”
Máel smiled. “Why don’t you ask around and find out? I’m sure Prince John would like to know an outlaw’s asking around to deliver that dagger to an earl who’s in line for the throne. Or, is that what you wanted us to do for you, Tadhg? Ask around? Draw Prince John’s attention down upon us?”
Fáelán let silence fall, then said, “Why do you look to us, Tadhg, when your friends of many years can not, or will not, help you?”
“I need to get her to safety,” he said fiercely, nodding toward Maggie in the other room. She sat in front of the bright fire, untouched food before her.
Fáe followed his glance.
“She is an innocent,” Tadhg said.
“There is no such thing.”
He fisted his hand on the table. “You’ve no idea.”
“Innocence is death,” Máel said softly.
Fáelán looked at Tadhg for a long second. “Take her to the Cove.”
Tadhg snapped his gaze back. “I would not take her to Renegades Cove if my life depended on it.”
“What if hers did?”
Silence again.
Fáe sat back in his seat and looked into the fire. “Tell me, little brother, are they hunting you?”
Tadhg’s jaw worked.
Fáe shook his head. “I thought as much. English honor is a tarnished thing. If you cared for her, Tadhg, you did poorly to bring her into your world.”
“You think I do not know that?” Tadhg said a low snarl. “It is done now. She was already unsafe, and I had a mission that required me here. And when it is complete, I am taking her home.”
The words were out. Saying them solidified them, like plunging molten iron into water: forged. He would devote his life to this cause, then, taking Maggie home.
A smile touched Fáe’s taut face. “You forget, we have no home.”
“I have a home, and I am taking her to it.”
“You declaimed your
home, and serve its enemy’s king.”
He dropped his hand on the table and leaned closer to Fáe’s pale eyes. “You speak to me of treachery and abandoned causes? You, Rardove’s heir, turned into a bandit of acquisition? You will do anything for whoever pays you the most to do it. What have you to say about enemies and abandonment?”
“And how are you different?” Fáe shot back, leaning forward an equal measure. “Except that you serve the foul English. I serve no one, and that is better than an Englishman. And you do not fool me, even if you fool yourself: you did what you did to further your own ends, the same as I.” His face twisted into a grimace, half smile, half bared teeth. “Do not speak to me of ambition and grand causes, little brother. You come from the same place I do.”
“You think I do not know that?” He thumped his chest with his closed fist. “You think I have not spent my waking life trying to be something other?” His voice was low, but it carried like a shout. “Criminals, outcast, renegades and outlaws. At least I have served something better.”
Fáe snorted, then sat back in his seat and crossed his arms over his chest. “We will take your woman for you, watch her. You, little brother, are on your own. We do not aid the English.”
Tadhg was surprised the fury in his gaze did not strike his half-brother down. “‘Take my woman?’”
Fáelán shrugged a little. “Watch her for you.”
