20. Chapter Twenty
Chapter twenty
Reginald stood on the battlements long after the door had shut behind Aingeal, his hands braced on the cold stone rail.
He could still feel her. Not only the fierce answer of her mouth beneath his, though that lived in him like fire banked deep under ash.
Not only the way she had come to him with none of the startled uncertainty of the first kiss, as if jealousy and hurt and wanting had all broken loose together and found him waiting.
What stayed with him most was the recoil.
She wanted him. He knew that now beyond denial. But there had been something else in the way she had torn herself back, in the look on her face when she fled.
She was not afraid of him. And because he knew it, because he had answered her with equal force instead of mercy, he could no longer pretend that what lay between them was only desire.
She was bound to him now. Not by promise. Not by vow. Not even by the marriage bargain they had once meant to escape.
By feeling.
Reginald straightened slowly and pressed one hand to the back of his neck as if the motion might ease the knot drawn tight there.
Aingeal no longer merely watched him. No longer merely distrusted him, argued with him, worked beside him, kissed him once, and called it weakness. She was invested now. Wounded already. He had heard it in her voice.
You have made leaving unbearable.
The words had struck harder than any accusation of deceit.
He had made himself matter. Little by little, not by design but no less thoroughly for that, he had worked his way into her life.
He had stood beside her in council, on the battlements, among her people, until the castle had begun quietly shaping itself around his presence.
He had answered her, challenged her, steadied her, wanted her, kissed her twice.
And all the while, the truest thing about him remained buried beneath a dead man’s name and a crime he had spent years calling duty.
He shut his eyes briefly. Canterbury rose at once. The cathedral air, cold and vast. The silence before violence. Becket’s face as he stood and did not flee, making martyrdom of simple refusal.
Reginald had carried that day like a sealed relic. A wound wrapped too tightly to heal and too stubbornly to rot. Yet in recent days, the wrappings had begun to fail.
étaín had named Canterbury in the chapel. Aingeal had demanded truth on the wall. And before either of those moments, with blood drying on his arm and Aingeal’s hands binding the wound, he had nearly told her of it of his own accord.
Why?
He had asked himself that already and found only fragments. But now, standing alone in the dark with her mouth still burning on his, the question returned and would not be set aside.
He did not want her forgiveness. The shape of it felt wrong inside him, too pure, too simple for the rough and fractured thing he actually was.
He wanted her understanding.
The realization had once seemed almost noble when it first came to him.
Now it looked barer and more selfish. He wanted her to know what he was before it was too late.
To know he had not ridden to Canterbury hungry for blood.
That he had believed himself a loyal man acting in the heat of rightful service.
That he had heard the king’s rage and mistaken it for command because he had been shaped all his life to answer kings.
But beneath even that wish lay a more bitter truth.
He wanted her to understand enough not to turn from him. He wanted her to see the man he had been and still choose the man he was trying, too late perhaps, to become. That was the hope of a coward as much as a lover.
He swore under his breath and snatched up a split harness strap from the worktable near the stair, only to cast it down a moment later. His hands had no patience for useless labor tonight.
He left the battlements, crossing toward the outer wall.
Night had hardened while he stood above. Wind off the marsh cut through wool. Torches bent in their irons. Only a few thin stars showed between the clouds.
Go.
Go now, before she asks you to stay. Before étaín speaks. Before truth takes shape and costs more than it must. It was the only way he could come away clean.
But even as the thought formed despite his resistance, another rose to answer it. He would not leave Aingeal behind. He would not leave the life he had begun, against all wisdom, to want with every part of himself.
He stopped walking.
The realization settled in him with the same cold solidity as the stone beneath his boots.
Not because he had suddenly become noble.
Not because he was better than he had been.
Only because, somehow, against all reason, she had opened his heart and forced life back into places he had long believed dead.
A clatter in the yard below pulled his gaze.
A rider had come through the outer gate, even at this hour.
Reginald straightened at once.
The horse’s flanks were dark with sweat. The rider slid down stiffly and spoke quickly to the gate watch. Another man ran toward the hall. Within moments, Seamus appeared in the yard, followed by Tomas with a lantern in one hand and his cloak thrown half over his shoulders.
Reginald knew it was border trouble. He was already heading down when Seamus saw him.
“Tracks again,” Seamus said without preamble as Reginald crossed the yard. “North of the old ash this time. Two cattle gone. One outbuilding fired but caught before the roof took.”
“Not the same families?”
“No. Fintan’s people. Farther north.”
“Any dead?”
“Not tonight.”
Reginald nodded once. “Riders at first light?”
“Sooner, if Tomas stops reading the report like a love letter.”
Tomas ignored him and held out the folded parchment. “The boy from Fintan’s holding says the raiders didn’t press inward. They wanted to be seen and gone. Testing the line again.”
Reginald took the report and read it in the lantern light. The details were sparse but clear enough. Hoofprints where they should not be. A shutter broken. Fire started and checked. A message, not slaughter.
He handed the report back. “Double the northern watch. Send men to the holding before dawn. If they are testing us again, they’ll want to know how quickly we answer.”
Seamus nodded and strode off at once, already calling for two gate men.
Tomas lingered. “There is another matter. Father Cillian asked me to find you if I saw you wakeful.”
Reginald looked up sharply. “Why?”
Tomas reached beneath his cloak and drew out a folded sheet of parchment. “Because the bishop’s clerk left behind a copied account among the letters he brought. Father Cillian has been looking for the right hour to put it in your hands. He nearly burned it as scrap. Then he saw the names.”
Reginald took the parchment.
The handwriting was a clerk’s hand, the sort of hand that believed history could be made orderly with ink. At first, it looked like exactly what he expected: some churchman’s retelling of old grievance, polished into moral instruction.
He almost handed it back unread until one line caught his eye.
The king in wrath spoke lament, not command, and those who heard zeal where law had not been given made of anger their own authority…
Reginald read it twice. Then a third time. The words did not change.
Not command. Anger. Their own authority.
He had told himself, all these years, that Henry’s rage had been charge enough. That what followed in Canterbury had not begun in him, but in service. That he had been a blade drawn by another hand.
But the account said something he had never allowed himself to name.
Anger was not command. Hearing command in anger required interpretation. And the interpretation had been theirs.
His.
No, he thought at once. A priest’s cleverness. Churchmen liked moral cleanliness too much. They loved drawing hard lines through men who had lived in mud, politics, and war.
And yet the defense no longer settled as firmly as it once had.
He remembered Henry’s fury too well. Remembered the words not as decree, but rage. Remembered how quickly he and the others had seized upon them. How ready they had already been. How little persuading had been required.
Had he obeyed? Yes. Had he also wanted action? Wanted resolution? Wanted the matter ended by steel because steel was the language he understood best? The thought split something beneath his ribs. For the first time, he could not say with full conviction: I merely obeyed.
Tomas watched him too closely. “It is only one account.”
Reginald folded the parchment once. “Yes.”
“But it troubled Father Cillian enough to mention.”
“Cillian is troubled by half the world.”
“And by you?”
Reginald looked at him.
Tomas did not look away. After a moment, he said, “You needn’t answer that.”
Reginald tucked the folded parchment into his belt. “See that the villagers from Fintan’s are brought inside the walls before dawn.”
Tomas nodded. “Aingeal has already ordered it.”
They crossed the yard together for a few paces before Tomas turned toward the hall and Reginald toward the stables. The horses would need readying for the northern ride, and a man in motion could sometimes outrun thought for a little while.
Not tonight. Every step only tightened the snare around him. Desire. étaín’s recognition. Aingeal’s suspicion. Canterbury. The letter at his belt. The memory of her mouth. The memory of her stepping back from him as though from an edge.
He stopped outside the stable doors and stood beneath the eaves while sleet began, fine and sharp, ticking against the yard stones.
If the truth came from étaín, Aingeal would hear it as exposure. If it came by rumor, she would hear it as cowardice. If it came only after his disappearance, she would hear it as final proof that she had loved a lie and been left to carry the wreckage alone.
There was no road left that did not wound.
But one road was worse than the rest.
The old instinct in him still wanted delay. Still wanted the people of her castle to look at him as one of their own. One more day. One more ride north. One more border matter settled. One more breath before he put into words the thing that might drive her from him forever.
That instinct had kept him alive. Now he saw it for what it was.
Self-preservation.
He rested one hand against the stable door and bowed his head briefly. He was not ready to confess. Not ready to repent. Not ready for forgiveness.
But something had broken in him all the same.
When he lifted his head, the sleet had thickened into colder rain. Somewhere behind those stone walls, Aingeal moved through her own unrest, loving him enough to be wounded and distrusting him enough to recoil.
If he let the truth reach her by any mouth but his own, he would not only lose her. He would deserve to. For the first time, Reginald understood that silence no longer protected her from the truth.
It only protected him from the cost of speaking it.