15. Chapter Fifteen
Chapter fifteen
The rider came in just before the midday meal with road mud on his hem and a bishop’s seal half-hidden in the fold of his sleeve.
Reginald saw him from the practice yard, where he was helping one of the boys repair a shield.
The horse clattered through the gate damp with sweat.
The rider dismounted stiffly, spoke first to the guard, then to Tomas, who had come from the hall already wearing the expression of a man bracing to be inconvenienced by written news.
A clerk, Reginald thought. Or some priest’s man. Ordinarily, he would have let it pass. Messengers came and went every week. They brought quarrels over land, pleas for grain, warnings about roads, demands for men. A castle was tied together by paper and wax as surely as by stone.
But when the newcomer pushed back his hood, something old tightened inside Reginald.
The man was a cleric. Not high-ranking. Narrow-faced.
Wind-burned. His tonsure had grown out past discipline, and his hands were reddened by cold.
Yet the Church sat plainly on him all the same.
A small bronze cross caught the weak daylight at his throat.
So did the careful stillness of men whose authority came from words rather than swords.
Tomas took the packet the rider offered.
The cleric said something low.
Tomas’s gaze flicked toward the chapel before dropping back to the letter.
Reginald bent again to the shield, though his hands had gone too precise. He drove the peg through leather and wood and told himself there was no reason for the prickling at the back of his neck.
By the evening meal, the cleric had not left.
He had bathed, eaten, spoken at length with Father Cillian and Tomas, and been given a place at the high table with the solemn courtesy reserved for men who came under church business.
Reginald entered the Great Hall last.
He had learned the habit in war: measure the space, the exits, who sat armed, who watched too openly. Excommunication had only sharpened it.
Tonight the hall was warm with roasted meat, tallow, and damp wool steaming near the fire.
At the dais, Brennach sat at Aingeal’s left.
étaín was farther down, bright as candlelight even when still.
Father Cillian sat near the visiting cleric, as if church business might need translating before the hall could digest it.
Aingeal did not look at Reginald when he took his place beside her.
That hurt more than it should have.
Since the scene at the evening meal the night before, her coldness had come in fine, measured increments.
She had spoken to him only when necessity required it.
In council, she had not leaned close. On the battlements, she had chosen Brennach’s side.
Even the accidental courtesies that had begun to grow between them, a passing cup, a low murmur, a glance held beyond propriety, had vanished so completely he wondered if he had imagined them.
Her coldness sat in his gut like a stone.
He kept his face unreadable and reached for the bread.
The cleric was speaking before the meal had settled. “…the bishop of Salisbury says the old divisions have not healed,” he told Father Cillian. “Some wounds in Christendom are too useful to powerful men to be allowed to close.”
Father Cillian sighed into his wine. “That could be said of half the Church’s quarrels.”
“And all the Crown’s,” Tomas muttered.
Politics, church disputes, old hostilities were as common to supper as salt. Reginald broke his bread and listened without seeming to.
The cleric dabbed his mouth with a cloth. “Canterbury is still invoked in every argument from York to Winchester. One would think Archbishop Becket died yesterday, not years past.”
The name struck Reginald beneath the ribs. He kept chewing.
The hall did not change. A spoon scraped wood. Someone asked for ale. A child laughed before being hushed. The world continued.
Only inside him did the air tighten.
Father Cillian shook his head. “Men make martyrs or villains according to their need. Neither makes for truth.”
“True enough,” said the cleric. “But the story grows with every telling. Some say the king wept. Some say he did not. Some say the knights were driven by zeal. Others by ambition. In every version, Becket dies once for God and ten times more for politics.”
To the men around the table, it was history. A caution. A sermon dressed as a story. To Reginald, it was stone beneath his boots and blood striking bright across it.
“Do they still name the knights?” Brennach asked.
The cleric nodded. “Always. Such names do not easily die.”
Reginald felt the moment move through him like blood.
“FitzUrse,” the cleric said. “De Tracy. De Morville. Le Bret.”
His own name, spoken aloud in Aingeal’s hall as though it belonged to a dead man. Or worse, a tale.
No one reacted beyond mild interest. No one except étaín.
Reginald did not look at her. The instinct not to betray himself was too old. He kept his gaze on the platter and took another bite, but he did not taste it.
He felt her attention.
At last, he lifted his eyes to the cleric. “And do they say where those men ended?”
“In stories? Everywhere. In truth, who can say?” The cleric lifted one narrow shoulder. “Men vanish after such things. Or change names. Or die in foreign service. There are always tales.”
étaín was watching now. He could feel the sharpened stillness in her the way a man feels heat before flame.
Father Cillian stated, “There are always those who think a man may bury an act by traveling far enough.”
“And can he?” étaín asked lightly.
Reginald looked at her then.
She sat with one elbow beside her cup, all ease and brightness to anyone who did not know how to look beneath surfaces. But her eyes were fixed on the cleric.
The cleric smiled thinly. “That depends on whether he hopes to bury the act, or himself.”
Soft laughter answered him.
Reginald did not join it.
Aingeal still had not looked at him.
That fact bit harder now, threaded as he was between two women and two dangers: Aingeal’s withdrawal hollowing him, étaín’s attention making the room perilous.
étaín asked, “And what do men say of FitzUrse himself?”
Father Cillian glanced at her in surprise.
The cleric was happy to continue. “That depends whether you ask monks or soldiers. To monks, he is a devil with a title. To some soldiers, a man who obeyed too readily. To others, only a blade in another man’s hand.”
The old anger stirred inside Reginald. A blade in another man’s hand. Once, that had been enough.
The king had ordered it.
But the doubt fissuring beneath that certainty would not let him rest there now. The memory of the king’s rage as speech rather than command haunted him.
étaín’s voice came again, bright and almost careless. “And what do you think, Sir Donal? Was he devil, soldier, or merely obedient?”
The table quieted by a degree.
Reginald lifted his gaze slowly.
Her expression had not changed. A curious lady asking after old history. Nothing more. But now he understood. This was not flirtation.
She was testing him.
“Dead men are often made simpler in story than they were in life,” he said.
étaín’s eyes sharpened.
The cleric nodded. “A fair answer.”
But Reginald saw it had not satisfied her, because she had not been asking about history. She had been asking about him.
The meal went on. Ordinary life resumed, as it always did, swallowing the dangerous thing and moving around it.
Reginald answered Seamus on patrol routes. Deferred to Brennach on supplies. Did not seek Aingeal’s gaze, though he felt her beside him like a wound.
And all the while étaín watched. Not constantly. She was too clever for that.
But every few moments he felt the inquiry return.
By the time the hall emptied, he knew two things. Aingeal’s coldness was no passing mood. And étaín suspected who he really was.
He found the stables because his first impulse was to flee.
The stable was not silent. Horses shifted. Leather creaked. A hoof struck wood. The air smelled of hay, manure, damp earth, and warm animals. A man knew where he stood in a stable. A horse wanted grain. Leather wanted oil. Nothing pretended to be anything else.
Reginald stopped at his gelding’s stall.
The horse lifted its head and huffed softly. Reginald stepped inside and ran a hand down its neck.
He did not reach for the saddle. If he were truly leaving, he would have done it already. Quietly. Efficiently. Before one more meal tightened the lie around his throat like a noose.
étaín knew something. It would not be long before inquiry became action. If he left tonight, he might still outrun the full unraveling.
Then he thought of Aingeal.
Not the cold woman at supper. Not the one whose public cruelty had left him absurdly winded. He thought of her in the infirmary with blood on her fingers and fierce concentration in her face. Of her on the battlements, hair half-loosed by wind. Of her hand flat beside his on the map table.
He swore under his breath. Wanting her was not reason enough to stay.
If he fled, by dawn the castle would know Donal O’Raida had vanished. The council would know. The servants. The guards. And if étaín already suspected, his departure would confirm everything.
The shame would not cling to him alone. It would fall on Aingeal. On her judgment. The alliance already spoken aloud. On every border lord watching for weakness. On every man who had ever looked at her and thought too young, too female, too alone.
Reginald rested both hands on the stall door and drew one long breath.
He could not leave her.
“I thought you might be gone.” Aingeal’s voice came from the stable door.
Reginald turned.
She stood in the entrance with a lantern in one hand, her cloak drawn tight around her.
“I considered it.”
She stepped inside. “And?”
“And leaving now would do more harm than staying.”
“To the castle?”
“To you.”
Her face changed. The shift was small, but he saw it. “I came to apologize,” she admitted.
He did not answer.
“What I said in the hall was unfair.”
“It was not entirely false.”
“No.” She tightened her hand around the lantern handle. “That is why it was cruel.”
The horse shifted behind him. Reginald stroked its neck once, needing the simple motion.
Aingeal drew a breath. “étaín is not the danger.”
“No?”
“No.” Her voice thinned. “I am.”
He went still.
She looked down at the lantern flame. “I have been jealous before. I have wanted to be chosen before. I have let that wanting make me small and hard and reckless. I hurt someone I loved. Not in words. Not only in words.”
Reginald felt the edge of the confession, bloody and old.
“Máire,” he said softly. Pain crossed her face.
He waited.
“I saw étaín touch your sleeve today,” she said. “It was nothing. A kindness. And for one moment, I hated her for being easy to love.” She gave a small, broken laugh. “How ugly that sounds aloud.”
“It sounds human.”
“I do not want to be merely human if human means hurtful and dangerous.”
He crossed the distance between them slowly, stopping short enough that she could retreat if she needed.
“I know something of calling a dangerous thing by a cleaner name,” he said.
Her eyes lifted.
“I called obedience virtue,” he said. “I called anger duty. I called consequence necessity because the other words would have required me to look at myself too closely.”
She watched him as though every word mattered.
“Is that what you hide?” she asked.
The truth rose in him. Canterbury. Becket. He could have ended it then. Destroyed her hope before it grew larger. Saved her from him.
But he didn’t. “It is part of what I hide,” he admitted.
She absorbed that with a small, visible effort.
“No more public blows,” she said at last. “From me.”
“No more evasions meant to punish you,” he said. “From me.”
“That is not the same as truth.”
“No.”
“Will you give me that?”
He looked at her in the lantern light and felt the trap of his own heart close. “I am trying to learn how.”
Aingeal nodded once. “I do not want you to leave tonight,” she whispered.
The words struck harder than any command. He could not answer without betraying too much, so he bowed his head.
She turned toward the door, then paused. “Donal.”
He looked up.
“Do not let étaín frighten you into running.”
Too late, he thought. Aloud, he said, “I will not run.”
She left him with the lantern light thinning behind her.
Reginald stood in the stable long after she was gone, one hand on the horse’s neck, the other pressed against the rough wood of the stall.
étaín suspected. Aingeal hurt. Canterbury waited.
He had chosen to stay. For the first time, staying felt less like concealment than a sentence he had passed upon himself. And yet, beneath the fear, there was one dangerous mercy.
Aingeal had come back to him.