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“You don’t ask what they are,” Keegan noted. “The reasons.”
“You feel I’m safer here, with you here. Shana tried to kill me, twice, and she’s his now. She’s Odran’s now.”
“All the portals are guarded. She can’t come through. She can’t harm you.”
“She won’t kill me.”
His eyes narrowed. “You’ve foreseen?”
She shook her head. “I know I won’t give her the satisfaction. Then there’s Yseult. She’s tried for me twice, not to kill—because unlike Shana, she’s not, in Marco’s terms, crazy as fuck—but to disable me enough to get me to Odran. The first time, she’d have succeeded if not for you. The second time, right back there.”
She turned, pointed. “I dealt with her. But I let my emotions, my anger, my need to hurt and punish her rather than just end her get in the way. I won’t make that mistake again.”
“You’ve grown fierce,mo bandia.”
Fierce? She didn’t know about that. But resolute. She had become resolute.
“I believed myself ordinary—less than even that—for a very long time. I know what I am now, what I have, and I’ll use it. You worrying about me takes your mind off what you need to do. You should stop.”
Like her, Keegan watched the littles line up for training. Young, he thought, with a mixture of pride and regret. And, laying a hand on the hilt of his sword, remembered he’d been the same, done the same.
“Do you think the only reason I want you here is worry for you?”
“It’s a factor, but I’m also useful here, and you know it.”
“Aye, you are. You helped with healing wounded and brought comfort—bring it still with your visits to those in mourning. And you take too much there. It shows.”
“Thank you very much. I’m going to start using glamours.”
“You’re beautiful.”
The way he said it so casually, as if it simply was, brought her a ridiculous thrill.
“Even when you’re tired,” he continued, “and too pale and I see their grief all over you.”
“You do the same. Yes, you’re taoiseach, yes, it’s duty, but it’s more than that. You grieve, too, Keegan.”
“Don’t take that from me.” He gripped her hand before she could lay it on his heart. “Even a shadow of it. I need it, just as I need the anger, as I need the cold blood. I know you helped with the dead, and I wouldn’t have wished that for you.”
“They’re my people, too. I’m as much Talamhish as American. Probably more when it comes down to it.”
“And still, I wouldn’t have wished it. You sent Marco back, and I can’t offer you, not now, the same kind of companionship here, in a place that’s not home to you, like Ireland or the valley. I’ve hardly had time with you other than sex and sleep—and more sleep than sex, I’m sorry to be saying. This, here and now, is I think the longest we’ve spoken alone since after the battle.”
“You’re taoiseach, and you’ve had council meetings, Judgments. I know you’ve spoken to all the wounded, all those who lost someone. I know because they tell me. There are repairs and training and I can’t even imagine what else. Do you think I expect you to spend time with me when you have so much else to do and think about?”
He looked at her in that way he had, so intense. Then looked away again, to the training fields and the village.
“No, you don’t expect, and maybe that’s why I wish I could give it to you. You’re a mystery to me still, Breen Siobhan. And all I feel in me for you, another mystery. I don’t always like it.”
He made her smile again. “That’s often abundantly clear.”
“I need you here, for all the reasons you said yourself. All of those, aye, but I need you here for myself. I don’t have to like that either, but… I’m explaining, as best I can.”
It touched her, in the deep, that he’d bother to try.
“You’re getting better at it. The explaining. You’re never going tobe brilliant at it, but I think, with practice, you could be competent enough.”
A smile twitched at the corners of his mouth. “That’s a bit of a poke, and well done.”
