16. Chapter Sixteen
Chapter sixteen
The ring of blade against blade rose from the yard below in a clean, measured rhythm and drew étaín out of sleep more effectively than any maid could have managed with basin and chatter. She gritted her teeth, thought of putting the pillow over her head, then finally went still enough to listen.
It was not the wild clash of men in panic, nor the ragged confusion that followed bloodshed. This sound had shape. Discipline. Intention.
For a moment, she remained beneath the blankets, warm in the hollow she had made through the night, staring at the pale gray light pressing at the shutters. The chamber smelled faintly of lavender, damp wool, and the cold ash left in the hearth.
In the courtyard below, someone had been awake long before dawn softened the sky, much too early for her.
Whoever practiced below had discipline bred so deeply into him that even the cadence of his training carried meaning. It sounded, oddly enough, like conversation.
Iron and breath. Question and answer.
Curious, étaín threw back the blankets and slipped from bed. The rushes were cold beneath her bare feet. She crossed the chamber, pulled one shutter inward, and leaned into the damp morning.
Mist clung low in the inner yard. It drifted in pale ribbons over the stones and softened the edges of everything below, as if the castle had not yet fully decided to wake.
Boys with practice shields clustered near the wall in a restless knot of limbs and eagerness.
A groom crossed the far side of the yard with a bridle over one arm.
In the open space near the armory, two men faced one another.
Seamus she knew at once. Thick through the shoulders, compact, impossible to mistake. He fought like a man hewn from oak root and hammered iron, every movement carrying the memory of older, uglier battles.
The other man…
étaín narrowed her eyes.
Sir Donal O’Raida moved with the same unsettling economy he had shown at supper. Nothing in him was for display. No flourish. No useless turn meant to draw watching eyes. He struck, recovered, shifted.
It made him seem controlled.
Seamus came in hard and low, all pressure and force.
Donal met him, turned, and put himself exactly where the next blow could not land.
The motion was so smooth étaín almost missed how it happened.
One heartbeat they were squared. The next, the whole shape of the exchange had changed, not through showmanship but through inevitability, as if the world had always meant him to be standing precisely there.
A boy rushed in at Seamus’s barked command, and Donal turned to meet the new threat at once. His body simply understood before the lad had fully committed himself.
étaín leaned farther over the sill, the cold stone biting into her palms.
She had watched men train all her life. Boys who wanted to look fierce. Lords’ sons who fought for applause. Veterans who mistook noise for skill and swagger for command. Men so in love with the idea of their own strength that they wasted it in practice and had little left when it mattered.
The boy overbalanced on a turn. Donal caught his wrist before he could pitch forward, corrected the angle of his grip, said something too low for her to hear, then stepped back. The boy flushed, nodded, and grinned despite himself.
étaín smiled faintly. It was not merely that Donal was handsome, though he was, in that dark, severe way that made foolish girls dream of chapels, soft kisses, and men speaking softly over their hands.
And it was not merely that Aingeal watched him as if trying very hard not to. It was the feeling of him.
Familiar.
The thought came sudden and sharp, like a door opening in a quiet room. She had seen him before. Or someone very like him.
She frowned and kept watching.
He turned slightly then, catching a practice sword from another squire with one hand, and the thin morning light struck the side of his face. A pale scar cut near the brow. His profile sharpened in the mist: strong nose, hard mouth, eyes hooded in concentration.
étaín’s breath caught. An uneasy tug pulled inside her, the edge of a memory brushing past and refusing to settle. Where had she seen him?
At court, perhaps. She had gone south often enough with her father. At a feast? A tournament? Some Yuletide gathering crammed with loud men too pleased with themselves?
No. Nothing in him belonged to feasts and banners. He did not carry himself like a man bred to be admired. He carried himself like a man who had once needed very badly not to die.
He struck again, then lowered the practice blade when Seamus called an end.
The boys scattered at once, noisy, flushed, and relieved. Donal stood still for a moment, breathing hard but evenly, one hand braced at his hip.
Then he lifted his face and looked up.
At her window.
étaín stepped back without thinking, pulse jumping once in foolish surprise.
For one absurd heartbeat, she felt as if she had been caught doing something improper, though all she had done was watch a man train from her own chamber window.
Then she laughed softly at herself, closed the shutter, and called for a maid to braid her hair.
Still, even as she dressed, the unease remained. His face was familiar. Or if not his face, then his presence. His voice. Something was etched into the corner of her mind that she could not quite reach. But she knew him.
She was almost certain now.
étaín noticed that Aingeal did not eat enough.
She noticed everything about the people she loved, especially when they pretended to be made of sterner stuff than flesh.
Her cousin sat at the morning board in her solar with an untouched roll on her plate and her fingers wrapped around a cup that had gone cold long ago.
The room was bright with thin daylight. The shutters stood half open.
A draft lifted the edge of the table linen.
On the hearth, the fire had burned down to a patient red glow.
Aingeal sat very straight in her chair, as she always did when she wanted the world, and herself, to believe she was entirely in command of whatever weighed on her.
“That is the third time you have looked out the window without seeing anything,” étaín said pleasantly, tearing her bread in half.
Aingeal glanced back at her, wary already. “Have you come north to count the number of times I look out the window?”
“I came north because I missed you, which is a far nobler mission. Your looking out the window is merely a secondary grievance.”
Aingeal exhaled through her nose.
That, in itself, was encouraging. It meant she was not yet fully lost to whatever severe weather had settled over her spirit. étaín leaned back in her chair and studied her openly.
Aingeal looked tired. Beautiful, of course.
She had always possessed that grave sort of beauty that caught men unprepared and made them speak more carefully than they intended.
But there was strain at her mouth this morning.
A hard line between her brows that had not been there when they were girls.
Her eyes looked darker too, not from illness but from wakefulness carried too long.
étaín’s amusement softened. “You are troubled,” she said.
“The border is troubled,” Aingeal corrected.
“And you have decided to carry the whole burden yourself, which remains one of your more exhausting traits.”
Aingeal reached, at last, for the bread. “You have been here just a few days. It is too soon for criticism.”
“Then let us call it observation.” étaín waited until Aingeal had taken a reluctant bite before adding lightly, “Your Sir Donal is interesting.”
Aingeal’s hand stopped halfway back to the plate. “‘Your Sir Donal’?” she repeated coolly.
“Yes. The dark one in the yard. The one all the boys are now trying, and failing, to imitate.”
“He is not mine.”
étaín bit back a smile. “No?”
“No.”
“How sad for someone,” étaín murmured.
Aingeal gave her a flat look.
étaín laughed softly and propped her chin on her hand. “Do not glare at me so sternly. I only mean he is striking, and he carries himself like a man with actual substance, which is rarer than it ought to be.”
“He carries himself like a soldier.”
“Mm.” étaín tipped her head. “And like a man trying very hard not to be seen too closely.”
Aingeal’s gaze sharpened at once. “What do you mean by that?”
“I do not know yet.”
Aingeal’s shoulders tightened in the defensive stillness that always came before she chose her words too carefully.
étaín watched the change and felt her concern deepen. “You dislike him?” she asked.
Aingeal’s mouth thinned. “I do not know him well enough to decide.”
“That was not what I asked.”
Aingeal set down her cup with a precision that was almost severe. “You have been here only a short while. Why are you suddenly so interested?”
étaín blinked, then smiled slowly. “I asked because I have eyes. And because every time his name is spoken, you become a fraction less pleasant than usual.”
“I am always pleasant.”
“You are many things. Pleasant is occasional.”
That earned a tiny, unwilling shift at the corner of Aingeal’s mouth.
étaín pressed a little more gently. “Tell me this, then. Do you trust him?”
The humor vanished from Aingeal’s face at once. “No,” she said too quickly.
étaín went still. She knew Aingeal had thought of that answer in advance. “And yet,” she said after a pause, “you keep him close.”
Aingeal looked away, toward the open shutter, and the silence that followed told étaín more than any confession could have. He was a danger already allowed too far inside the walls.
Before she could ask more, a knock sounded at the door.
“Come,” Aingeal called.
The door opened. One of the kitchen maids entered with fresh hot water and a murmured apology. Behind her, another figure paused in the corridor.
Donal.
The moment étaín saw him again, the odd tug returned. Familiar.
He stopped when he noticed her and bowed first to Aingeal. “My lady.”
Then to étaín. “Lady étaín.”
Up close, in daylight, the unease sharpened. It was not only his face. It was the whole of him. The contained stillness. The way he held himself. The scar at his brow. The gravity in his gaze when it settled on a person, as though he were always measuring what harm might yet come from this moment.
Aingeal rose at once. “What is it?”
“Seamus asks for your decision about the riders to the eastern ridge.”
“Tell him I am coming.”
He inclined his head.
étaín should have let him go. Instead, she heard herself say, almost idly, “You were training the boys this morning.”
He glanced at her. “Yes, lady.”
“You are patient with them.”
Something in his expression shifted. Caution adjusting itself. “They will learn faster if they are corrected properly.”
étaín smiled. “You make severity sound charitable.”
Aingeal, very still by the table now, said nothing.
Donal gave the smallest hint of amusement. “Only in skilled company would that be taken for praise.”
étaín laughed. That feeling sharpened. His voice.
Not merely the sound of it, but the cadence.
She had heard that tone somewhere before, stripped of calm, carrying under a different roof, in a different room, beneath worse circumstances.
The certainty flashed and vanished so quickly she almost doubted it, but enough remained to set her nerves on edge.
Aingeal interrupted before étaín could follow the thought.
“Was there anything else?”
Donal turned back toward her. “No, my lady.”
For the briefest instant, Aingeal and Donal looked at one another, and something moved between them.
Intimate enough that étaín felt like an intruder merely witnessing it. She watched the look pass and thought, with sudden certainty, that whatever lay there was already dangerous.
Donal bowed once more and stepped back into the corridor.
Aingeal followed him a moment later, leaving étaín alone in the solar with cooling breakfast and an unease she could no longer laugh away.
For several breaths, she sat without moving. Then she rose and went to the open door, listening to the fading murmur of their voices in the passage.
Sir Donal O’Raida. The name did not fit the man.
étaín had spent years being underestimated by people who mistook warmth for simplicity. She knew the advantage in being thought harmless. She knew how much could be learned by smiling, by listening, by letting others speak until they revealed the seam in their own disguise.
Sir Donal had seams.
And Aingeal, proud, guarded Aingeal, was already close enough to be wounded by them.
étaín looked down the empty corridor. Whatever Donal O’Raida was hiding, she would find it. Not because she wished to harm him.
Because she loved Aingeal too much not to know.