6. Chapter Six
Chapter six
Reginald felt the celebration long after he left it. Music still struck behind his eyes as he moved through the corridor, pipes shrill and wild in memory, drums beating hard enough that the stone itself seemed to carry the pulse.
Every cheer had sounded as though it belonged to him. Every raised cup had felt like accusation dressed in approval.
He was a fraud seated in another man’s place, wearing another man’s future while the castle blessed him for it.
He had left the dais with practiced calm. No one stopped him. Why would they? He was the honored bridegroom.
Beyond the Great Hall, the noise thinned by degrees. First echo. Then vibration. Then only a pulse inside his skull. Torchlight guttered low in the sconces. Shadows drew long fingers across the walls. With every step, the air cooled.
Leave.
The thought rose clean and hard. He could saddle a horse before dawn. Ride south. Abandon the name before it finished burying him. He had survived worse than flight. He knew how to vanish.
Yet, his feet did not turn toward the outer ward. They carried him deeper into the castle.
Marriage pressed in on him from every side.
How could he stand before an altar and call himself husband when the man who had a right to that place lay beneath cold earth?
How long before someone asked about lands he had never seen through Donal O’Raida’s eyes?
How long before one wrong detail split the lie open?
And beneath all that, Aingeal.
She had not looked at him like a woman dazzled by a match. She had looked at him as if he were something meant to hold. A pillar. A shield. A strength she had not chosen but might be forced to trust.
That unsettled him more than desire ever could.
The smell of the feast faded. Beeswax and old incense met him instead, faint and sweet, threaded with the memory of smoke. Ahead, the chapel door stood half in shadow, its carved knotwork worn smooth by years of hands.
He stopped with his palm flat against the wood.
What could God offer him now? What had God ever offered him?
He opened the door.
The chapel was small, nothing like Canterbury. A low vaulted ceiling. Pale stone. A narrow lancet window casting a blade of moonlight across the floor. Candles burned before painted saints whose gold halos caught the trembling light and made their eyes seem almost alive.
Watching.
The door closed softly behind him. Silence fell over the room with such force it felt less like peace than judgment.
He had not stood alone in a chapel since…
The thought struck like a blow.
Canterbury rose whole inside him. Not prayers. Not incense. Not the grand holiness men had wrapped around the memory afterward. What returned was stone and sound. Columns like pale trunks. Boots striking sacred floor.
Where is Thomas Becket?
His own voice. Sharp. Unafraid.
He remembered white robes. Torchlight over drawn steel.
Becket standing as though no force on earth could bend him.
He remembered the first clash of metal. Then the rest: the shock of steel meeting flesh, the jolt up his arm, the terrible knowledge that once a blade landed there was no clean path back from the deed.
He had not struck first. He still clung to that. But he had struck.
The floor had taken blood. Red blooming over gray stone, too bright, too vivid, as if the world itself had opened.
At the time, he had believed it necessary. The realm could not fracture around a miter. The king’s peace had to mean something. He had obeyed. He had acted where hesitation would have been weakness.
He lifted his eyes to the painted Christ above the altar.
The candle flames trembled.
He had taken Donal O’Raida’s name not from fear, he told himself, but from calculation. The Church had condemned him. The court had whispered. He had done penance he had not meant. Stories traveled faster than horses. A dead man’s name had offered cover.
He had not thought beyond that.
A bitter laugh broke from him. He had spilled blood on sacred ground, and now he was meant to kneel for vows.
He crossed to the altar and set both hands on the white linen cloth. The purity of it struck him almost violently.
Blood had spread over white once.
The image came back so sharply his throat closed. The first hot arc of red. The way it feathered outward into branching lines. The wet finality of blows landing. Afterward, silence. Not horror. Not weeping. Silence so complete it had seemed the world itself had recoiled.
And in that silence he had felt no remorse. Only justification. The task had been done.
He opened his eyes.
Ireland, not Canterbury. Tonight, not then. Yet Canterbury lived in him still, iron at the back of his tongue.
He could sit at a head table and accept toasts. He could carry a dead man’s name. He could build an entire life atop expectation and deceit. Underneath it, he would still be Reginald FitzUrse, the knight who had killed Archbishop Becket.
He stared at his reflection in a polished brass candleholder. Strong jaw. Controlled eyes. Hands disciplined by years of war. There was nothing monstrous in the face that stared back. That was perhaps the cruelest thing. He looked like the sort of man people trusted to guard a gate.
He thought of Aingeal.
She did not know what stained him. She did not know that when he looked at an altar, he saw blood. She did not know the lie he was.
He could leave. He should leave. Before vows. Before she bound herself to rot she could not yet see.
But even as the thought formed, another rose beneath it, quieter and more dangerous.
What if here -- with duty, land, and her clear gaze -- something new could still be built?
Hope whispered like a treacherous friend.
The chapel door opened.
Reginald turned too quickly.
Aingeal stood just inside the threshold, firelight from the corridor outlining her.
She had left the feast behind, but some of its brightness clung to her still: blue gown, silver at her throat, copper-red hair coiled with care.
Her eyes were not bright. They were searching.
“I thought I would find you praying,” she said.
His voice came rough. “Why would you think that?”
“Because you left the feast. Because you did not join in.” She let the door close behind her. “Because men who carry shadows often mistake chapels for hiding places.”
That struck too near. He looked away.
She crossed the floor slowly, not timidly, but with the care of a woman stepping toward a blade she did not yet know was drawn.
“You knew who I was when you came here,” she said. “Men do not travel blind into arrangements like this. Someone told you.”
“I was expected,” he said. “I understand that much.”
“You understand it, but you do not claim it. In town, you guarded me as if I were duty and nothing more. Tonight you sat at my right hand as if the chair were borrowed.” Her voice sharpened. “Why?”
Because it is borrowed, he thought. Aloud, he said, “Marriage is a serious thing.”
“Do you doubt me?”
The question landed harder than he expected. “No,” he said quietly. “I do not doubt you.”
Relief flickered across her face before she mastered it. “Then why this distance?”
He breathed once, slowly. “Because I have done things I cannot unmake.”
She went still.
The truth had escaped him. Not all of it. But enough to alter the air between them.
“We all do difficult things,” she said carefully. “You are not the only one who has had to choose.”
“No.” A humorless sound left him. “But we do not all wear the same darkness.”
Anger moved through her, quick and bright. “If you mean to hide behind darkness while my people pay the price of your silence, then leave. I want a man who stands in light.”
He flinched because he deserved the blow. “You deserve a man without shadow,” he admitted.
“I deserve a man who stands where he says he stands.” Her voice lowered. “I do not need a mystery for a husband. I do not need a husband at all.”
He should have bowed then. Left her there. Taken horse and road before dawn. Instead, he stepped closer. Not enough to touch. “I will be where I am needed,” he said. “That is the only promise I can give.”
“That is not enough.”
“No.” The word cost him. “It is not.”
For one breath, the truth stood naked between them: she knew he concealed something; he knew she would not stop until she knew what it was.
Aingeal’s gaze moved to the altar, then back to him. “If you do not leave and choose to bind yourself to this house,” she said, “you will stand before God and men and speak plainly. Name. Blood. Loyalty. Deeds.”
His body went cold. There it was. The shape of the snare. “A public oath,” he said.
“A public truth.”
He almost laughed. “Those are not always the same thing.”
“No,” she said. “But tomorrow I will learn which one you choose.”
She turned and left him before he could answer. The door closed softly behind her.
Reginald remained in the chapel, the altar linen creased beneath his hand, the saints watching with their painted eyes.
He had come seeking a place to hide.
By morning, she would drag him into the light.