A Knight With an Angel (Assassin Knights #3)

1. Chapter One

Chapter one

Reginald FitzUrse woke as if another man had been breathing through him.

For one long, stunned moment, he did not know where he was.

Bed or straw. Day or dark. Noise found him first: the hollow scrape of sandals, the dull slap of a blade against stone, a room so wide he could hear his own heartbeat echoing in it.

He bolted upright. The world swam. Instinct sent his hand to his head before he could think.

In the dream, the cloister doors had opened slowly and surely, and four men had come through.

Two monks in brown robes stepped aside. Long tables stood in rows.

Candles hunched and guttered. Reginald saw the archbishop before he truly heard him, yet even in sleep that voice reached him: quiet, steady, the kind of calm that made other men feel suddenly loud and clumsy.

The memory of it struck like accusation.

He had stood there with the king’s will on his tongue and a sword at his side. De Tracy beside him. Le Brey. De Morville. He remembered the pillar beneath his hand, the cold marble when he gripped it like a last hold on sanity. He remembered the blade falling.

The dream sharpened what waking had tried to dull.

He saw the monk who threw himself forward.

He saw the archbishop’s face at the strike, not twisted in terror, not broken by panic, but calm.

That calm was the worst of it. Then came the sound that had never left him: that small, savage whoosh and clang.

Blood on the flagstones. The archbishop falling as if some unseen hand had struck him down.

But the dream would not end there.

The archbishop did not remain still. He rose in death, vast as a tower, blood pouring down over his robes. He lifted one hand and pointed straight at Reginald. His mouth opened, and blood spilled from it in a red torrent that rushed over Reginald’s hands, his chest, his face.

Reginald struck at himself, swiping at the stain.

His breath tore in and out. For several moments, he could do nothing but sit there with his heart hammering against his ribs.

Then he swung his legs from the pallet and felt the familiar lurch of ship timber beneath his feet.

He was still aboard the small vessel that had carried him from England.

The hull groaned softly around him. Salt and damp wood filled the narrow dark.

He braced one hand against the wall and rubbed hard at his forehead until the pounding eased. Then anger came.

It rose hot and practiced, like something he had kept alive on purpose.

He was not wrong. What else could they have done with a man who turned God’s house into a court of politics?

What else could they do with a man who excommunicated bishops and set himself above the realm?

The king had sent them. They had obeyed.

That was law. That was order. That was the thing that kept kingdoms from splintering and men from dying in chaos.

Let them call it murder and fold their hands in prayer. Let priests condemn him and pious men speak of damnation. Let them force him through a penance he had never believed he needed. They had sat safe behind stone and silk while he had done what service required.

He had done his duty.

Yet the dream clung.

What would not leave him was not the shouting, nor even the blood.

It was the archbishop’s open mouth. The split at his crown.

The hideous sound of steel parting bone, a sound Reginald could still taste like iron at the back of his throat.

He could swear before any court that he had obeyed his king.

None of it pulled the stain from under his skin.

He flexed his fingers until his nails bit his palm.

Something from that night still smoldered in his blood. Grief, perhaps. Rage. He did not care to name it. He squared his shoulders and said into the empty dark, “I did what I was told.”

The words were armor.

He dressed slowly, each pull of boot and jerkin a vow to keep moving. If he kept moving, the past might not catch him.

By the time they had docked and he departed to ride inland, the rain had turned the road to slick brown churn.

It cut through low fields like a greedy scar, hedged in rough stone and hawthorn that clawed at his sleeves as if the land itself meant to hold him back.

His horse’s hooves sucked in the mud. Reginald kept his head bent against the weather, but the world still pressed itself on him: a knot of crows in a bare tree, a churchyard gate shut hard against the cold.

Ireland, he told himself, was far enough from England. Far enough from Canterbury. Far enough that a man might pass unmarked if he kept his past buried.

Something dark in the grass caught his eye. Cloth in the mud. A dull glint of metal. A body.

Reginald reined in at once and swung down from the saddle.

The knight lay on his side with an arrow driven beneath his ribs, cruelly placed, meant to kill slowly.

Breath rattled in the knight’s throat. When Reginald knelt, the man seized his sleeve with surprising strength, clutching like a drowning man reaching for driftwood.

“Bless…” the man gasped and failed. His words came broken after that. A few villagers. A holding on a southern ridge. Then only one thing seemed to matter to him. He tightened his grip and forced out, “Keep them safe.”

Reginald pressed his cloak hard against the wound, the way a soldier learned to do, though he knew already it would not save him. “I’ll see they’re kept.” He meant it. That was still something he knew how to give.

The dying man searched his face as though trying to fix it in memory. Then the light went out of his eyes, and his body sagged backward.

Rain tapped steadily on leather, steel, and wet grass.

Reginald stayed there a moment, kneeling in the mud beside the body, feeling that old numbness creep up through him like smoke. Then habit took over. He searched the man with the blunt efficiency war had taught him: belt pouch, papers, a few coins, and a signet ring worn smooth with use.

The seal bore a name. He turned it over in his hand and stared at it while the rain slid down his face.

Who had this man been? What life had he ridden from this morning? What debts, what loyalties, what people were waiting behind walls for the sound of his horse? Now he lay nameless in the mud save for the name cut into a ring.

Reginald closed his fist around it.

Ireland would not know Canterbury. Out here, a man’s worth would be measured at a gate, on a road, with steel in his hand and steadiness in his voice. Not by whispers from a cathedral floor. Not by priests. Not by memory.

If he wore another man’s name, he might bury his own beneath it. The thought came cold and practical. So simple it sickened him.

He looked down at the dead knight. This was theft. Not of coin. Not of horseflesh. Of a life.

His jaw tightened. He should leave the ring where it belonged. He should bury the man with his name intact and ride on beneath the weight of his own. That would be the honest thing.

Honesty had brought him penance, scorn, and a face every man in England had learned to hate.

The ring lay cold in his palm.

At last, he slid it onto his finger. It fit as though waiting for him.

He buried the knight beneath a stand of leaning ash trees with a spade borrowed from a nearby croft. There were no prayers. No priest. Only labor. Wet earth. Cold stone set for markers. Rain soaked his hair and ran into his eyes. Mud clung heavily to his boots.

As he dug, Canterbury came back in bright, merciless flashes: the hush inside the cathedral, the archbishop’s terrible calm, the certainty with which other men believed ritual and suffering could wash blood from human hands. Reginald set his teeth and drove the spade deeper.

Duty. Kings. Commands. Those were things he understood.

Absolution was for other men.

When the grave was done, he laid the last stone in place and stood over it in silence. Already, the rain softened the edges of the mound. Soon, it would look no different from any other rise in the earth. The man beneath it was gone. Only the ring remained.

Reginald looked at the seal on his hand.

He had not set out to steal it. He had meant only to keep faith with a dying stranger. Yet his hands had long ago learned the hard lesson of survival: a man took what he needed if he meant to go on living.

His horse shivered as he mounted. Rain drove his hair flat against his brow. Behind him lay fresh earth, cold stones, and a name now hidden from the world.

Ahead lay the road.

His old name still sat inside his chest like a buried weight, heavy and immovable. But the face he would show Ireland would not be Reginald FitzUrse.

It would be Donal O’Raida.

He turned the horse forward and rode on as the road swallowed the sound of hoofbeats.

You may cross water, he thought. You may cross half the world. But you do not escape what you have done.

You only decide which part of yourself men are allowed to see.